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MAN'S PLACE IN THE 
KOSMOS. 



(Copyright, 1906.) 

BY 

DR. S. A. MERRILL. 



"Laugh where you must be candid where you can, 
But justify the ways of God to man." 

—Pope. 

"That to the height of this great argument 
I may assert eternal Providence 
And justify the ways of Qod to man." 

—Milton, 



New York: 

ALDEN BROTHERS, 

Publishers. 






18 i906 



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1 gf^m/ili^Wf^ 



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«.*IUL«J.III'^ 



CONTENTS. 

PAGE. 

Similations, Integrations, and Harmonies 7 

Origin of Species 11 

What is Man? 17 

The Infinite Man 33 

The Everlasting Gospel - 39 

In the Beginning 49 

Do the Scriptures Teach the Doctrine of Reincarnation ? . . 57 

Where and What is Heaven ? (^y 

What Are the Hells? 72 

The Spiritual Man 88 

The Higher Consciousness 90 

Live in the Spirit 93 

Concerning Infestations and the Casting Out of Evil 

Spirits 95 

Jesus and Judas 104 

Progression in Spirit Life 115 

Pre-existence (poem) 125 

The Spiritual Universe 128 

Concerning Sabbaths 135 

No Missing Links 141 

The Foods of Man and the Moods of Man 147 

Forces Personal and Impersonal 158 

Churches and Creeds 162 

Babylon 167 

Who Is Jesus? .,^ 168 

The Mystery of God CT, . ..170 

Organic ,'4 172 

Differentiations (• . ••• i73 

Progressions \ 175 

Scraps of Truth ; ; 177 

India .^^'f,. 179 

The Metaphysiology of the Spiritual Man 182 

The Solar Spiritual Worlds That Surround Our Star — 

the Sun 185 

The Celestial City 189 

Man's Place in the Kosmos i93 



"Strike me, but hear me.^'—Phocion. 

"The greatest study of mankind is man." — Pope, 

"All are needed by each one; 
Nothing is fair or good alone." 

— Emerson. 

"Virtue is knowledge: vice is ignorance." — Socrates. 

"Except ye eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his 
blood ye have no life in you. For my flesh is meat indeed 
and my blood is drink indeed." — Jesus. 

"I am the root and the offspring of David and the bright 
and morning star," — Jesus, 

"As a man casting off worn-out garments taketh new ones, 
so the dweller in the body, casting off worn-out bodies, enters 
into others that are new." — Buddha. 

"And then Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be small 
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall be come 
forth unto me that is to be a ruler in Israel — whose "goings 
forth" have been from of old — from everlasting.'' — Bible. 



PREFACIAL. 

"God of the granite and the rose 
The molecule and the morning star." 

It is not my purpose to preface my book with a 
multiplication of words which are very good foods in 
their ways and places, but of little use — like all other 
foods — where used too much. 

There be some, perhaps, that may be shocked when 
they see in the book a deliberate defence of such char- 
acters as Pharaoh and even Judas, and little did I 
suppose, when more than a half century ago, as a stu- 
dent at college, I provoked the indignation of the dear 
old president by putting him in a cul de sac in the 
class room for defending both of them before the 
class — I little thought at that time that I should ever 
be called upon more than a half century away to utter 
a word in their behalf. 

But so it is — has happened the materialist would 
say — ^for (this wonderful "whirligig of time'' doth 
oft bring in some very ''strange revenges V So, here 
we are, dear reader, ready and willing and pleased 
to defend the man JtidaSy et id omne genus upon the 
philosophical high grounds of a loftier, truer and 
nobler morality than the dear old world hath hitherto 



PREFACIAL. 

been able to receive, for its judgments are often not 
'^spiritually discerned'' — many of them. 

To all, and such especially who can see no proper 
defence of the man we refer them to the humble book 
I have written, which though abounding with many 
and even great and grave faults, will, I trust, state 
the case fairly ; and let me hope, also, may accomplish 
something — to "justify the ways of God to man." 

It was for this purpose chiefly that I undertook to 
write the present very humble work. But if in doing 
so I shall have contributed anything toward so noble 
an object I shall be even more content. Yea, happier 
than to have conquered a kingdom. 

S. A. M. 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



SIMILATIONS, INTEGRATIONS AND 
HARMONIES. 

He who liveth with and for himself abideth alone. 
^'Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a grain of wheat 
fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone. But if 
it die it bringeth forth much fruit." He who liveth 
in and unto the life of the "neighbor," who hath sent 
forth abundantly the tentacles, nerve filaments and 
radicles of his manifold being into the lives of his 
fellows, and by earnest words and deeds hath con- 
verted them into the living tissues of nerve, muscle 
and ligament, both in truth and indeed vitally united, 
fast bound, the feeble, finite, perishable microcosm into 
the life of the Divine Humanity; hath in every deed 
and truth infinitized and eternized his infinite being by 
intermingling and interblending its fibers with the 
tissues of the infinite Macrocosm — God evermore and 
ever blest — the All and in All. It is one of the Incar- 
nations of the Divine man: for man is the Divinest 
object in this mighty universe of ours. 

"Abide in me and I in you. ... I am the Vine; 
ye are the branches. ... If a man abide not in me 
he is cast forth as a branch and is withered ; and men 
gather them and cast them into the fire and they are 
burned." Again: "That they all may be One, as 
Thou Father art in me and I in Thee; that they may 
he one in us" These utterances are from the most 
perfectly inspired words that have ever, as yet, fallen 
from the lips of man. 

No friction can be allowed to enter into the Eterni- 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

ties, Infinities and Unities of the Ever-Living Life ; no 
jars or discords amid the Divine Harmonies, rhythms 
and melodies, by which the bright Hving orbs — mate- 
rial, spiritual. Celestial — measure the Infinite years of 
God. Truly saith the poet Shakespeare : 

"There's not the smallest orb that thou beholdest, 
But in his motion like an angel sings. 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubims ; 
Such harmony is in Immortal souls; 
But while this muddy vesture of decay 
Doth grossly close us in we cannot hear it. 



f> 



While in this social life of reciprocal and fraternal 
loves, utilities and duties, each and all occupy different 
locations and degrees of latitude and longitude upon 
the social and spiritual planet — creating those marvel- 
ously manifold differentiations in their original life 
forms, forces, functions, opinions, and in their mani- 
fold relations to the social kosmos, there is created a 
divinely appointed labor of Love, for the united effort 
and patience of society and of the individual. 

And here, while the powers of the individual to per- 
fect, to save himself, are in truth and deed very limited, 
those of society for similating, uplifting, harmonizing 
the individual unto himself and itself are practically un- 
limited; especially when we come to consider as we 
shall by and bye, the wondrous plan employed by the 
terrestrial, spiritual, and Celestial humanities to de- 
stroy the dead Karmas of the past, and to create a new 
Karma by opening the "Gates of the Future" and 
introducing man into a new social-spiritual environ- 
ment and a new reincarnation. 

In order that we may more simply represent to the 
eye the marvelous interdependence of man upon his 
fellow man for support and continuity of life, let us 
take three perfect cylinders, with perfectly even bases, 
such as are commonly used for supporting the fronts 
of buildings. Place these pillars perfectly erect upon 
a perfectly level plane surface and at the corners of a 
triangle whose sides are less than equal to the heig^ht 

8 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

of each cylinder. They will stand there forever, pro- 
vided no force intervenes to disturb them in any way, 
although very little will be required. But now let the 
top of each of these cylinders be notched so that they 
shall dovetail each into the other when required, and 
let them at the same time be made to lean toward each 
other until their tops meet and match together so as 
to form a triangular pyramid, their bases also being 
beveled to suit their new position. It would now 
take an immense force to disturb them. 

Individually regarded, these cylinders were the most 
perfect when in their first estate, before being notched, 
beveled and made to lean from the erect position, or 
the one in which all are bound to fall without support. 
But now, if we consider these several beings as social 
entities, having similar needs, a common purpose and 
a common destiny, these similations and differentia- 
tions in their life forms, which in the individual are 
blemishes and imperfections, become the greatest 
source of strength, stability, continuity and harmony 
of life to each and all of them, which, taken together, 
no outside force, not even an earthquake, can over- 
throw or destroy. 

In this way, and in all ways, do all things of this 
marvelous and sublime universe of God dovetail and 
cog into their fellows; and thus doth every soul of 
man, however humble, eventually inosculate its most 
inierior veins and arteries, and interweave and inter- 
mingle its nerve filaments with the life currents, the 
living tissues and the nerve system itself of the infinite 
universe of God; and thus, also, doth the soul "lose'' 
itself in the infinite ocean of Nirvana. In like manner, 
in all normal and properly developed life forms in this 
divinely wise and benignant universe of the Living 
God, each entity imparts to his fellow and receives 
at the same time from him in return something of the 
infinite strengths ; and in all these universal life forms 
and relationships each individual gives and receives a 
sustenance, a strength, a life force, an infinitization, 
an eternization — I will not say in a ratio proportional 
to the cube of the numbers so associated together in 

9 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

harmonic relations — ^but in a proportion and an involu- 
tion of numbers that run into the Infinite. Truly says 
Emerson : 

"I am the owner of the sphere, 
Of the Milky Way and the solar year. 
Of Phidias' art and Mozart's strain, 
Of Lord Christ's heart and Plato's brain." 

If we take another example from the material life 
of man, and reflect upon it attentively, we shall have 
another illustration of that marvelous power with 
which he is endowed, as a social being, to re-duplicate 
himself to an almost infinite extent in his ability to 
minister to his own enjoyments : I enter a restaurant 
and sit down to enjoy a brief meal that costs me only 
a few cents; that meal, which cost me but a few 
moments of my time at some easy occupation, has been 
brought together — the different elements of it — from 
nearly every country and climate under the stars, and 
for its possibility and its cheapness has employed every 
ship that sails the seas, every train that crosses the 
continents, and every laborer that toils for man under 
the whole heavens. So of the daily paper that adds 
to the enjoyment of my meal, at the cost of only two 
pence, by bringing me the news from every quarter of 
tiie globe. It bears the impress of the thought, the 
genius, the invention, the labor and the capital not 
of this age only but of ages. 

And thus doth the myriad-handed, myriad-footed, 
myriad-brained social man reach forth the tentacles of 
his manifold being and draw his maintenance from 
the bosom of the Infinite Being. 



ra 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



ORIGIN OF SPECIES. 

The origin of species, say my celestial 
teachers, consists in the grafting of a spirit 
form upon some cognate terrestrial form of 
life that is living in gestative conditions with 
the mother at the time of its incarnation. 

This is a brief statement of the law concerning the 
origin of species, and places it in harmony with the 
origin of all progressive beings in God's great universe, 
for the universe is one, and its law of enfoldment is 
also one, whether in material or spiritual spheres and 
estates, since all forms of progressive life have their 
origin in the spiritual world — in the spiritual life of 
the Creator himself. 

It is in truth by the cion or graft that life proceeds 
upon its long, marvelous and wonder-working way 
upward and onward in its infinite and ever-progressive 
eternal flight through the infinitely m.anifold ranks, 
orders and systems in plant, animal, human, spiritual, 
kosmic and universal, and by which life imparts itself 
to the innumerable forms which illustrate the path of 
its long ascent in the unf oldment of new forms of being. 
In these marvelous metamorphoses by which life 
ascends from its most simple and primeval forms to 
those of higher and more complex organization, the 
Creative Intelligence proceeds by various methods — 
though the principle is one — several of which we shall 
indicate in passing. 

The first is one employed where it is desired to create 
a being intended simply to perpetuate the species and 
upon the same plane of existence with the parent 
forms. In this case the incarnating form or cion is 
a spermatozoon, taken from the male parent, and is a 
new being, in embryo, similar to that parent and an 
exact copy of him in most respects until brought under 
maternal influences. 

The spermatozoa are nothing less than cions taken 
from the nerve system of the male and are derived 
from portions of that nerve system that have been 

IX 



H^AN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

planted in the male organs and fed with highly stimu- 
lating foods until a rudimentary brain has been devel- 
oped at the free extremity, and the caudal extremity 
has become developed into the germ of what afterward 
becomes the spinal cord. This "seed" animal, which 
is so often referred to in the sacred writings, is an 
exceedingly minute microscopic copy of the nerve 
system of the paternal ancestor — ''a chip of the old 
block," in vulgar parlance — and when grown to adult 
years would be nearly an exact copy of that ancestor 
in all cases were it not so greatly modified afterward 
by the maternal influences exerted upon the child in 
utero in dressing the new being in its fleshly robes of a 
lifetime. 

There is, however, another potent cause of this varia- 
tion from paternal resemblance in the child when 
grown up. It is where there is an incarnation taking 
place in the child of some person from spirit life, for 
it is in this manner that great men are born to become 
leaders in all human affairs. Such reincarnations often 
increase the mental and moral force of the new being 
many times, as a certain Roman said of Julius Caesar : 
*'Csesar hath in him many Caius Mariuses." It was in 
this way that the whole Jewish people looked for the 
coming of their Messiah and also of Elias. 

On a certain time his disciples inquired of Jesus: 
''Why then say the tribes and the Pharisees that Elias 
must first come?" Jesus replied: ''Elias truly shall 
first come and restore all things. But I say unto you 
that Elias is come already, and they know him not, but 
have done unto him whatsoever they listed." Yes, it 
is in this way that great men are created to become 
leaders in all important concerns in human life, and 
the same principle obtains even in the lowest realms 
of plant and animal life in the evolution of a new 
species. Jesus fully indorses this doctrine of the rein- 
carnation, as the reader caii easily see by referring to 
his own statement in Rev. xxii., i6, in which he alludes 
to two of his own recent incarnations in plainest terms, 
which can neither be gainsaid nor misunderstood: 'T 
am the root and the offspring of David and the bright 

12 / 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

and morning star." Yes, Jesus was the "bright and 
morning star" of our civilization, but not the Infinite 
God who fills immensity ; and what is more, he never 
authorized any one to make so preposterous a claim 
in his behalf. 

"I am the offspring of David," said he to John, and 
truly, though the Sonship took place many generations 
before the time of Joseph and Mary. To this part 
of the statement of Jesus the whole Christian world 
will agree that it was not only true, but that it was 
owing to the fact that he was incarnated in the family 
of Joseph and Mary. They will admit the truth of 
the one incarnation, although . it practically concedes 
the whole doctrine of pre-existence and reincarnation. 
Jesus also stated furthermore that he was the *'root" 
of David. Now, Webster gives the word root, when 
applied to human beings, as signifying an "ancestor," 
a "progenitor," and gives it no other significations. 
But while the entire Christian world will likely admit 
the truth of the statement of Jesus that he was the 
"offspring" of David, they will refuse to concede the 
truth of his other assertion that he was — ^by incarna- 
tion also — one of the ancestors of David, though it 
stands in the same relation precisely to the subject of 
the sentence that the word offspring does. 

Besides, if he could incarnate in one world to help 
save its people, could he not also have performed a 
similar office for some of the other worlds that revolve 
about our solar orb? Why not? Certain it is at 
least that he claims to be an ancestor of David, and 
to have been such he must of necessity have incarnated 
in the same family line as the one by which he entered 
the family of Josegh, who was a lineal descendant of 
David, as both the genealogies of Matthew and Luke 
plainly state. 

And if the words of Jesus be true, that he was both 
ancestor and offspring of that Jewish monarch, it was 
by virtue of the fact that he had incarnated in the 
family line of David on two different occasions, viz., 
once within historic times as all the world knows, and 
also at some remote period away back before the time 

13 



'MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

of that king. With this view of the doctrine of rein- 
carnation it becomes easy to understand Jesus when 
he said: *'If he can receive (or understand) it, this 
is EHas, who was to come/' A plain intimation, as 
he states in Matthew also, that John the Baptist was 
a reincarnation of the prophet Elijah. 

The second form of the incarnating principle is made 
use of by the creative spirit architects where it is in- 
tended to create new species by grafting into some 
organ or other parts of the organism of the animal as 
the nurseryman often inserts a cion into one of the 
branches of a tree instead of using the entire tree for 
the reception of the graft. For example, the fin of a 
fish, limbs of quadrupeds that have developed an abnor- 
mal number of limbs or digits are among them, many 
of them being characterized as "freaks,'' but they serve 
to illustrate the principle involved in the case. The 
fossil horse of many toes and the person with six digits 
on each hand and foot are examples of this law. 

The serpent, with its most perfect spinal column, is 
the basic form for the evolution of all quadrupedal and 
bipedal forms of animal life on the globe. The nor- 
mal number of digits for the mammalia, and even for 
the reptilia, appears to be five. But instances have 
been known where entire families of human beings 
have been provided with six instead of the normal 
number, five. 

This would appear to indicate the intervention of a 
new law whereby one or more of the digital nerves has 
been removed from the nerve system of the animal. 
This could not take place if the Creative Wisdom had 
not created examples to teach man the nature and the 
operation of the laws in manifold and multiform ways. 

We have a very interesting illustration of this law 
in the African elephant, which has but three toes upon 
each foot, or two less than the normal number. The 
third, and one of the greatest, of these laws that govern 
the morphology of the animal and plant world is by 
the principle of elimination, an example of the opera- 
tion of which law we may see in the animal we have 
just introduced. This elephant, when he was evolved 

id 



) MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

from his paternal ancestor, appears to have lost two of 
his ancestral toes by elimination or by dropping two 
of the nerves that supply the toes on each foot. 

The African elephant, we believe, is a smaller and 
less powerful animal than the Asiatic, more wild and 
ferocious in disposition, but has powers of ''survival'' 
quite equal, probably, to those of the other. If the 
Asiatic shall ultimately survive his African cousin, it 
will likely be owing to his greater gentleness and intel- 
ligence that recommend him to civilized man by his 
greater usefulness. 

Another very interesting example of the law of 
changes that governs the morphology of animal life 
is to be found in the Asiatic and African rhinoceros. 
One of them — ^the Asiatic, we believe — ^has but one 
horn, while the other one has two. This example also 
supplies a potent argument against the Darwinian prin- 
ciple of evolution, with its rigid system of development 
along certain absolutely fixed lines. 

Unlike most other horned animals, its horns are 
placed one in front of the other, along the line of 
spinal axis, instead of having them placed at right 
angles with the line of the major axis, as in the case 
of the cow, the deer, and other horned animals. 

It can only appear to be the result of arbitrary and 
intelligent interference from some outside force, and 
not to be the result of infinitesimal increments of 
change and of growth accumulated through vast ages. 

The domestic cow is another illustrative example 
in some ways of the operation of the metamorphic prin- 
ciple in the transformation of animal forms, both by 
elimination and by transformation. She has four toes 
on each foot, but two of them are rudimentary in 
form and have been transposed in their position to 
the under and lower portion of the leg and are not 
used in locomotion at all. 

In many cases the cow supplies us with a very inter- 
esting example of the principle of metamorphosis by 
elimination. It is found in the "muley" or "polled'^ 
ox that is entirely destitute of horns. That the ordi- 
nary horned cow will at times bring forth offspring 

15 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

that is wholly destitute of horns, and in neighborhoods 
where no male animal of this hornless breed is to be 
found, we have abundant evidence both from personal 
knowledge and from the observations of others with 
whom we have spoken. We recall a case of the kind 
that occurred on the home place of my father when 
I was a lad of twelve years. It was an example of a 
baby calf without horns, from a mother with an ample 
head of horns, there being no male of that variety in 
all that section of Illinois. 

I have conversed with an old friend of mine — Judge 
v., of this place — who lived in the State of Indiana 
in the early times. The judge informs me that he has 
known of a number of similar cases originating under 
similar conditions, all of which were females, as was 
true of the other example to which I have just referred. 

If we turn our attention to the plant world, we shall 
see some interesting examples of plants retrogressing 
toward ancestral conditions — a form of atavism — 
whereby the plant becomes greatly transformed from 
original conditions. This is the case with the common 
wheat plant, tritictim vulgare. 

We have known whole fields of this grain, sown 
upon ground entirely new and with the best seed, that, 
in the low places where water stood more or less upon 
the young plants in winter, and freezing and thawing 
more or less in the winter, were transformed into 
chess, or cheat, as usually termed. 

Professor Loveland, of Summerland, Cal., informs 
me that the barley plant (hordeum vul.) in this State 
often undergoes a similar transformation under un- 
favorable conditions. 

These metamorphoses in the life of plants are per- 
sistent and permanent and must be regarded as new 
species of plant life — as much so as the Asiatic ele- 
phant and rhinoceros and the African elephant and 
rhinoceros are distinct species. 

We have known similar transformations to take 
place in the stramonium plant {datura stramonium) 
and in other phases of plant life. 

We now come to a more important part of our sub- 

i6 _ 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

ject, viz., the formation and grafting of nations. For 
this purpose, war, dreadful as it is in many of its 
aspects has been the instrument chosen by the higher 
powers who have superintended the evolution of civil- 
ization to accompHsh the work. 

It was by transplanting the Norsemen or men of 
the north, first from their lairs amid the icebergs of 
the frozen north, where they had developed an im- 
mense energy of body and of mind from long battling 
with its cold, its hardships and privations, into the 
sunny plains of Normandy, where they became Nor- 
mans and afterward into the ''right tight little isle" 
of England, 



WHAT IS MAN? 

Such was the question propounded by the afflicted 
Sage more than three thousand years ago and in all 
probability had been a subject of inquiry coeval with 
the existence of man upon the world long ere the man 
Job had opened his eyes to the light of it. 

Indeed it has become the question of questions for 
the solution of man and far outweighs all others that 
can command his attention, and far transcends all 
riddles that Sphinx ever propounded. And solve it he 
must, or perish. Yes, it is the puzzle, the hitherto 
insoluble mystery that has cast its mighty and myste- 
rious shadow over the untold ages of men's tenancy 
of the planet. 

"Star-Eyed Science" bows her head in the presence 
of the mighty question and confesses herself inadequate 
to the solution of this world's greatest and most inter- 
esting and important inquiry ever submitted to the 
attention of mankind. But "The greatest study of 
mankind is Man," and like many another "impossibil- 
ity" that has long since been solved and shelved, it 

17 



'MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

will in God's own good time be revealed to man in all 
its wonderful, divine beauty and glory. Yes, what is 
the purpose for which man was and is created ? What 
is his rank in creation? 

What part does he bear amid the vast forces that 
play the mighty game of Life in World and Universe ? 
Apparently evolved from protoplasm, or dirt ("And 
the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground 
and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life," Gen. 
ii., 7), he has gradually ascended through all ranks 
and forms of life from moneron to man, and from 
man to the God. 

Man, as a being of many Incarnations, is a spiritual 
kephaloid and, for a marvel, doth not lose his individu- 
ality by his incarnations with other souls of equal 
or like degree, though undergoing certain modifications 
by his new relationships thus formed, among which are 
a greater intensity and potentialization of his entire 
being. 

This, when properly understood, will serve to ex- 
plain why it IS that many persons of advanced intelli- 
gence are able to converse at once with a number of 
others, or to dictate to several amanuenses, at the same 
moment of time, the several personalities maintaining 
their respective individualities all the while. 

Such persons, by repeated Reincarnations, became 
endowed with poly-mentation, or many beings grouped 
in one, and without any loss of their proper indi- 
viduality. 

Manifestly a created being of very high and pro- 
gressed conditions, as we are obhged to consider him 
both from reason and from the Scriptures, since 
reason cannot see any place in the long chain of evolu- 
tion by which the full-orbed man could find any hold 
or lodgment in any of the ascending forms and series 
that were concerned in his development wherewith 
he could be incarnated until the evolved and evolving 
being should arrive at the physical ''image and likeness" 
of man himself — ^had attained the appropriate human 
plane. 

He must have been created for some indispensable 

18 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

use and function in God's great universe. The con- 
clusion is inevitable, that his presence in universal 
life in all his conditions, past, present and future, is 
neither a misfortune nor a mistake, and the Creator 
had no necessity to apologize for his work. The 
work of evolution has been carried forward in a 
systematic, orderly and Providential way, in which 
all the foods, forms, forces, means and methods that 
were required to bring him up to his present status 
were fully anticipated and provided for. Nothing 
was employed in the mighty work that was not abso- 
lutely necessary, and nothing was overlooked that was 
indispensable to its accomplishment in perfect time 
and way. 

Yes, man is a fixed and indispensable part and 
the chief factor in the evolution of the mighty worlds 
and universes by which he finds himself environed on 
every hand, and as necessary to the gods and to their 
universes as they are to him. ("All things were made 
by Him, and without him was not anything made that 
was made.'') And neither chance, caprice, chaos, 
world, flesh or devil have had aught to do with the 
work of the Creators except to help it forward. 

Yes, Creation is the eternal procedure and mani- 
festation of Law. But Law is nothing more nor less 
than the preconceived and pre-established plan, pur- 
pose, health and harmony that always existed in the 
Divine Mind (Holo-cosmos) and in the divine man 
or Micro-cosmos, In other words. Creation is only 
the steady and orderly outgrowth of life forms under 
Law, and Law is only an expression of the Divine 
Will, Intelligence, Love and Wisdom operating in 
Time, Space, Force and Matter in the evolution of 
men, of Worlds and of Universes under the directive 
agency and potency of the Supreme Intelligence (or 
Holo-cosmos) that presides over the Creation of all 
things. That it has appeared otherwise to mankind in 
past ages is due to his mental and moral destitution 
in his Spiritual Babyhood, when he was "naked" and 
destitute of all spiritual forms with which to clothe 

19 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

himself — and when he was little else than the spiritual 
larva of a man. 

Yes, it was due in greatest measure to this almost 
absolute lack of perception of the meaning of the 
forms of Spiritual Law, and at a time when the creeds 
and the beliefs of mankind were in the process of 
formation. "Therefore speak I to them in parables; 
because they, seeing — materially and literally — see not 
spiritually, and hearing — literally — =they hear not 
spiritually; neither do they understand." 

That these things should be so is what we ought 
naturally to expect as we look backward through the 
long, dim, uncertain twilight of past ages to learn the 
data from which mankind have formulated most of the 
creeds and the faiths that still continue to exert so 
vast and mighty influence over the minds and the 
hearts of men in this wonderful age, when the various 
material sciences and the spiritual philosophies and 
sciences have made so great an advance along the lines 
of universal progress. Yes, we are therefore obliged 
to conclude not only that man is a fixed fact and 
factor in Universal Life, and that he has been evolved 
through a long line of ascent from the very humblest 
and feeblest beginnings of Life on the globe ; and that 
his creation has been the result of the operations of 
Divine, Angelic Intelligence and Wisdom, which 
Science terms Law — ^which perfect Law is but an 
expression in Time, Space and Substance of Spiritual 
forms that pre-existed in the Divine, Infinite, Creative 
Mind itself — as much so and by the same law as the 
painting the palace and the statue pre-existed in the 
xninds of their artists before they began the practical 
work. 

We are furthermore obliged to believe that all things 
that concern the welfare and the happiness of man- 
kind were anticipated and determined, weighed, 
measured and perfectly understood and were evolved 
by steps that were foreknown, foreintended and fore- 
ordained, and that there is no event or movement of 
genuine interest to human kind taking place in the 

20 



HAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

world, that the Creator does not fully sanction, approve 
and determine, he himself being the author of it. 

And this is absolutely true not alone of great 
measures and movements that take form and place 
under the direction of so-called wise and good men, 
but also all important movements and events that 
originate with what are usually termed evil men. All 
are "raised up,'' foreordained and set to work by 
the Creative Wisdoms, as the Angel informed Daniel : 
"That the living may know that the Most High 
ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whom- 
soever He will: and setteth up over it the basest of 
men!" For the Lord hath need of men of bad morals 
as well as good in the accomplishment of His vast 
purposes in the evolution and perfection of the Divine 
Humanity. And where good men will not answer 
his requirements he employs even the "basest of men/' 
"For His ways are not our ways, nor our ways His 
ways." Said Jehovah to Pharaoh, who was one of 
the basest and most tyrannical of human rulers : "For 
this purpose have I raised thee up." 

Christians have hardly yet begun to understand 
and to appreciate the vast and indispensable service 
that the man Judas conferred upon the Christian re- 
ligion by taking the darkest part in the dark back- 
ground of the mighty picture of the mightiest, the 
grandest, and, we may add, also the most glorious 
tragedy since time and world began, by endowing it 
with the wings of the hatreds as well as the loves 
of mankind to bear forth into the world and into the 
deeps of the hearts and the lives of men the marvelous 
story of the Cross and into every clime and country 
the world over. 

"That the Scripture might be fulfilled !" Yea, more : 
that the grand and glorious purposes of the eternal 
God might be fulfilled, and that the sublime story 
of the Cross might be duly advertised and go forth 
to the spiritual conquest of mankind endowed with a 
divine power and energy to accomplish its wonderful 
and glorious mission ! 

For I take it that this greatest of the; world's 

21 



"MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

tragedies, of the man Jesus hanging upon the cross 
of Jew and gentile, and forgiving and praying for 
his tormentors who put him there : and the man Judas, 
who betrayed him, also hanging on a cross, the crea- 
tion of his own remorse at beholding the results of 
his own hands in the work of creating the other: the 
combined and contrasted elements of the wondrous 
tragedy in all its wonderful aspects — form a picture 
at once the most unique and impressive; yea, the 
greatest, grandest Bulletin ever set up in this little 
world of ours, and hath armed the mighty picture with 
a magic power and influence over the hearts and the 
lives of men everywhere that no other arrangement 
of the celestial programme for the salvation of man- 
kind could have imparted to it. 

''And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, shall draw 
all men unto me V' Yea, how marvelously true ! The 
real part that poor Judas played in this sublime tragedy 
of a world has never yet been told! But it will be 
in all due time. For he also, like Pharaoh, was 
"raised up" — incarnated to play the (seeming) base 
though indispensable role of treason in this sad, strange, 
eventful drama of Universal Life. As truly so as was 
Jesus himself, who was incarnated to enact the greater, 
grander and more glorious part upon Calvary in be- 
half of mankind. 

But let us inquire. What is the real purpose for 
which man is created, by whom and for whom un- 
numbered worlds are created and innumerable worlds 
are also destroyed when they have fulfilled their sub- 
lime purposes in the service of Gods and men; when 
from untold ages and uses they are no longer needed ? 
Yea, what are the real ends and uses that man sub- 
serves in the functions and economies of World and 
Universe? For these worlds that nightly parade the 
starry heavens without number are in very deed and 
truth the nurseries in which the Baby Gods are born 
and bred, as is apparent both from reason and from 
Scripture. They are created by the Gods of the 
manifold societies and Fatherhoods of the Spiritual 
and Celestial worlds, and that preside over the forma- 

22 



WAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

tion and destiny of men and of worlds, and for like 
reasons that earthly parents create families — ^to pro- 
vide the means and the instrumentalities for the per- 
petuity of their own earthly lives when past their 
labors and require the aid of offspring to sustain their 
life powers until they pass on to the higher planes 
of immortality. 

But these comparisons apply correspondentially, not 
absolutely and literally. These young infant Gods that 
swarm over and fill unnumbered worlds are created by 
the paternal Gods to provide the means for the per- 
petuation of their own spiritual existence, and hold 
a correspondential relation to them that the children 
of earthly parentage supply for the continuation of 
the earthly existence of father and mother, until the 
next kosmic change (of death) tenders it no longer 
needful. 

''Lo, all grow old and die." It is the law that rules 
in all the worlds. There is nothing) that can be 
organized so perfectly that it cannot be (/^-organized 
and wn-created by reversing the conditions under 
which it came into existence. It could only be ac- 
complished by an entire arrest of all change within 
itself, and that would be death. We here quote the 
words of the Buddha in this connection : 

''As a man casting off old, worn-out garments puts 
on new ones, in like manner doth the person who 
putteth off old bodies clothe himself in those that are 
new." 

This law applies to the spiritual body correspon- 
dentially in a degree. 

The Spiritual body or Psyche of man is as mucK 
a created and an organic entity as is the Soma or 
material body, and both are subject to a similar law of 
change, though the former exists under more lasting 
conditions, but never under conditions of absolute 
eternality save under the beneficent Cyclic Law of Re- 
incarnation. For progress in the spiritual realm con- 
sists not in perpetual motion in straight lines. All 
things of the universe move in curves and cycles and 
are forever returning to their original point of depart* 

23 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

ure to renew and refresh their being in primeval 
conditions. 

Were anybody obliged to move on forever in 
straight lines, it would soon pass beyond the limits 
of the habitable Universe, or, worse still, it would 
soon collide with some other part of Creation, with 
ruinous results. But all this is averted by the beautiful 
cyclic law of renewal and return to primeval con- 
ditions and estates, so that all things of this great 
and glorious Universe move one in Celestial, Divine 
Harmony. 

We can now perhaps begin to comprehend the fact 
that even the very Gods themselves are subject to this 
beneficent law of change, of renewal, of progress, and 
by the equally important law of waste and decay, and 
even of death itself, every unused faculty of mind 
or of body alike must have active and constant exer- 
cise or it will gradually weaken and tend to ultimate 
extinction, and, like the eyes of the once eyed but 
now eyeless fishes of Mammoth Cave and other sub- 
terranean waters, end in their final extinction. 

Hence arises the necessity for the renewal of the 
Spiritual man in terrestrial conditions at certain vast 
kosmic periods of time, the ordinary extent of which 
for the adult man may be a thousand years, which is 
the period assigned to it by Plato ; and the Milennial 
era given to it by John in the Apocalypse, during 
which the saints — those who lived this life in normal 
states — "will live and reign with Christ a thousand 
years." But which the wicked — ^those who lived this 
life under less normal conditions — ^will not share with 
them, being withheld by the evils they lived into this 
life by a long stay in the lower spheres to live out 
and free themselves from those conditions before they 
can enter the higher spheres. 

The two periods are one and the same. Hence 
arises the perpetual demand for new bodies to refresh 
and renew the clothing — that is, the bodies of the 
Gods or higher Celestial, angelic men ; for the bodies 
of men, both material as well as spiritual, are vestures 
in which the spirit clothes itself, and must be refreshed 

24 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and renewed at certain remote cyclic periods of time, 
as the terrestrial man renews his garments from time 
to time — ^bj^r incarnating in new bodies — or death 
will ultimately result. Hence, as already stated, the 
constant and eternal demand for new beings, new 
men and women, who are nothing more than new 
spiritt^l suits of clothing required by the higher 
Gods of the race to renew, reinvigorate and re-eter- 
jiize their spiritual forms, when worn and wasted from 
too long stay amid the glories and the splendors of 
the upper day. 

That the spiritual body is a destructible entity even 
the Scriptures teach. 'Tear Him who is able to de- 
stroy both soul and body in Hell!'' 

For the Gods themselves are but the organic, 
spiritual, cell life of the Supreme Being, and their 
forms, when worn and wasted from long residence 
and use amid the intense activities and splendors of 
the more potively polaric conditions of the higher 
Celestial, Spiritual Universes, must take an outing 
once in a long while, like a resident of city life in our 
own little world, to rest and refresh and renew their 
overtaxed spiritual powers amid the easy, self-indul- 
gent, spiritually relaxing forces of the negatively 
polaric lower planes of being. 

The ultimate appropriation of the spiritual forms 
of the men and the women for these marvelous uses 
of reincarnating with the higher Gods of the race — 
the men and the women whom we behold every day 
in such vast numbers making their ''exits and their 
entrances" upon this "Bank and Shoal of Time" after 
a brief stay upon the material planes of existence — 
explains the reason why it is that this great anc^ 
marvelous Universe of the Eternal God, already and 
always infinite, is not necessarily increasing in a new 
infinity of spiritual populations and in spiritual worlds 
to take care of them, which would be true were every 
human being that enters and exits from this stage 
of time and world is a novus homo or ''new man," 

When the new spiritual being — ^the Son — that has 
been created by manifold terrestriations or involu- 

25 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

tions in the worlds of matter until he has attained 
the spiritual stature of the "Father" to a degree, 
though in les^ celestial forms of the life forces, a 
biutual reincarnation takes place, or, more exactly 
speaking, the "Father'' incarnates in the "Son," since 
it was for this purpose the Son was created by the 
Father for the new creation and perpetuation of his 
own being and to prepare him to enter upon a new 
cycle and a new life of enjoyment and of labor amid 
the infinities and eternities of Life Universal. And 
this is what is meant by the ''reconciliation" of the 
Son with the Father. It is the harmonization of the 
twain "m and into one new man" by the Son's attain- 
ment of the spiritual estates of the Father, and thus to 
be able to incarnate with him in a new life for both 
Father and Son. 

"Neither pray I for these alone, but for them also 
who shall believe on me through their word : that they 
all may be one as their Father art in me and I in 
thee, that they also may be one in us." But this is 
the Social, Spiritual form of the Divine incarnations 
of men and Gods, which is less ontological and inti- 
mate in form and character than is the personal and 
individual form thereof. 

Into this divine celestial Unity of the "twain-in-one" 
the Son brings up from the lower material Universes 
new life forms and forces; while, on the other hand, 
the Father brings thereinto the Celestial, spiritual 
forces and forms of the higher Worlds and Universes. 
Each imparts to the other an endowment of new 
forces, both in kind and in degree, and each aids in 
eternizing the twain now being, now become one. 
"And I give unto them eternal life." 

Hath not the prophet Micah, referring to Jesus, well 
said: "And thou Bethlehem, though thou art least 
among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall 
he come forth unto me that is to be a ruler in Israel, 
whose ''goings forth have been from of old — from 

EVERLASTING." 

In Bhagavard Gita Krishna the inspired Hindu 
prophet applies a similar term to the cyclic evolutions 

26 



'MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

of all being. '1 am the going forth of the whole 
Universe, and likewise its dissolving. He who, cast- 
ing off the body, goeth forth thinking of me, ho 
entereth into my being.'' And thus the beloved 
Christ: *'And now, O Father, glorify thou me with 
the glory I had with thee before the world was/' 
"Many births have been left behind by me and by 
thee, O Arguna. I know them all, but thou knowest 
not yet even thine own/' 

"Heaven from all creatures hides the book of fate. 
All but the page prescribed, their present state/' 

Yes, it is a truth, and a very merciful one, that the 
gates of both the future and the past are benignly 
closed to mankind in his present mundane estates and 
conditions, which are germinal in their character and 
function. 

Were the Seed, when planted in the earth, to be 
long exposed to the solar rays, it would shortly perish. 
But man in this terrene existence is but a seed that 
is germinating in the soil and underworld of the earth, 
and any exposure of him to the unveiled splendors and 
glories of the higher life would affect him in a similar 
manner — unfit him for any further life in the lower 
spheres. He was planted here in the proper soil of 
earth to germinate and to grow up within himself in 
basic and in most interior conditions the mighty 
spiritual and celestial laws and principles of the higher 
worlds of his being. / 

Were he permitted [to know the splendors and the 
glories amid which ha has lived in his past spiritual 
estates, he would be prone to live in much sorrow and 
discontent from contrasting the two forms of his 
existence, past and present. 

Thousands, yea millions, would cast aside their 
bodies and rush into the other life before the proper 
time, in some momentary fit of madness — a step most 
fatal to their future happiness and well-being, as vast 
numbers in this unhappy age of suicides, war and 
murder will find to their cost. 

27 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

It IS, in truth, a salutary mystery that the Creator 
has for this reason suspended over the gates of the 
future to restrain men from accomplishing their own 
ruin. Let us take God's way into the great and 
glorious future and abide his own good time. 

Spiritualism, or free intercourse between the two 
worlds, was permitted by the Angelic Wisdoms at the 
time it came; first to the Shaker Friends, in 1837, ^^d 
was designed by them for the benefit of the' "Skeptics 
and doubting Thomases," who could not believe on the 
testimony of men who lived two thousand years ago, 
and needed fresh this year facts to get rid of their 
unbelief. 

Spiritualism had been suppressed by the Jewish 
authorities of the times of Saul and David, prompted, 
doubtless, by the Higher Authorities of the spiritual 
world, speaking through the prophets. It was also 
practically suppressed, after the advent of Christianity, 
by the Catholic priesthood, inspired by the same source, 
it being the intent and purpose of the spiritual leaders 
of civilization that those nations who were in any im- 
portant way concerned with the origin and spread 
of the Christian religion should not be permitted to 
have spiritualism introduced among them until they, 
or the majority of them, at least, had attained a 
mental, spiritual and a scientific status that would 
enable them to ^'handle" the subject without injury to 
themselves and to mankind. 

That the inhibition will be removed ere long there 
can be no doubt, and that the clergy will no longer 
oppose the return to the apostolic practices of healing 
and of casting out even of evil spirits we think there 
can be little serious doubt. The entire priesthood — 
save a few — for ages have cast aside the words of 
the Master as recorded by Mark xv. : 16-18, and as 
a result have fallen into much unbelief concerning both 
the words and the works of Jesus. 

That the Higher Wisdoms of the spiritual world 
have seen proper to suspend these practices in the 
churches during the greater portion of man's spiritual 
infancy, and for wise reasons that have been already 

28 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

given, there can also be very little reason to doubt 

Our clerical friends will, however, be obliged to 
give up their opposition to the practical operation of 
these important principles that so vitally concern 
human welfare, or they will ere long find their audi- 
ences thinning out faster than ever. 

The subject of the possession and the infestation 
of mortals by spirit men is a vast one, and one that 
can be fully and finally understood by a long and 
patient and intelligent study of it from both sides 
of the life of man. It is the active cause of most of 
the insanities that fill our asylums and send great 
numbers to the grave of the suicide and the assassin. 

That the beloved Christ was right, and wonderfully 
so when he professed to cast out evil spirits and devils, 
who by their arts and practices had obtained magnetic 
control of certain sensitive and weak-will elements of 
the human family, who also, being ignorant of these 
concealed foes and their works and ways, there cari 
be no doubt to one who has studied this very difficult 
question from a rational and impartial standpoint. 

The beloved Teacher made this subject of the cast- 
ing out of evil spirits a matter of special instruction 
and injunction upon his disciples, and at one time 
severely upbraided two of them because they could 
not cast them out. That many skeptical minds will 
ridicule the views of Christ in regard to these things 
and attribute them to his lack of science and all that. 
But the clergy, ''what are they going to do about it?" 

Obey the injunction of the Master, roll up their 
sleeves and go to work and aid the few who are 
already engaged in the work, or will they still con- 
tinue to give the subject a wide berth and denounce 
all those who believe that Christ knew what he was 
talking about and doing about, and are trying to do 
as he did? 

The subject is one of tremendous import to the 
whole family of man in both worlds, and for the 
simple reason that it is a question that involves the 
entire relations that exist between the two worlds of 
human life. 

""^ 29 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

To longer ignore these vast problems that so vitally 
concern the whole life of man, or to hold them as 
"contraband," and denounce all those who, moved by 
philanthropic motives, seek to investigate these ques- 
tions from both their spiritual and scientific sides, is 
neither just nor wise. 

There has never been a time in the history of the 
world in which so large a per cent, of human kind 
are afifected by the insanities that originate in the 
spiritual world of mankind, and the number is rapidly 
on the increase, both in Europe and America. While 
the population of Massachusetts increased at one time 
but 13 per cent., her insane people increased 50 per 
cent. 

The people of the State of California have filled five 
large public insane asylums, not to speak of the 
private ones. 



THE INFINITE MAN. 

The Universe is one man. But man is an infinite 
measure. It is that Infinite Divine Being we term 
God — the Supreme and perfect Oversold. 'Tn whom 
we live and move and have our being" and an indis- 
soluble and eternal part of that Infinite Man — if we 
obey his living eternal laws. 

If there be any of the evangelists to whom the world 
is especially indebted for having given it some glimpses 
into the greatest of all the sciences as indicated by the 
beloved Christ in his last great discourse to his disci- 
ples, and elsewhere in John's gospel, it is to John. And 
that greatest and most important of all the sciences is 
Metaphysiology, or the Physiology of the divine Man. 

John was the most spiritually minded of the disci- 
ples of the Master; saw most deeply into the occult 
truths of the Word — the spiritual Man, as delineated 

3Q 



MAN'S PLACE IN. THE KOSMOS. 

by Jesus in his discourses to the disciples and to the 
public. 

It was this more profound appreciation of the deep 
things of the spiritual man as set forth by Jesus that 
created and established the greater bond of love and 
sympathy between them than existed with Jesus and 
all others of his disciples, and which caused him openly 
to be called ''the disciple whom Jesus loved/' 

The other evangelists — Matthew, Mark and Luke — 
were Uttle more than historians of the ethical teachings 
of Jesus, though Matthew, in his report of Christ's 
''Sermon on the Mount,'' has manifested a profound 
appreciation of that greatest, noblest and best of the 
collections of moral essays, principles, truths, maxims, 
that were ever delivered to mankind. 

But Christ in that last and most touching of all his 
discourses, when giving his disciples his last and for- 
mal farewell, and in other conversations elsewhere 
with his disciples and with the multitude, has laid 
down a few simple, sublime outline truths that are 
destined to become the foundation of a new science 
and a new philosophy; and that science and that 
philosophy, as we have already seen,isMetaphysiology, 
or a proper knowledge of both the interior and the 
exterior forms and forces of the spiritual man. When 
Jesus informed his disciples and the Jews that unless 
they ''ate his flesh and drank his blood they had no 
life in them"; when he hold them, "I am the living 
bread which came down from heaven: if any man 
eat of this bread he shall live forever: and the bread 
that I will give him is my flesh which I will give for 
the life of the world"; and when he said, "I am the 
vine, ye are the branches," and many other of the 
sublime yet occult truths of the divine Word, he was 
laying the formations of a spiritual science of the 
lineaments and characters of the spiritual man incon- 
ceivably grand and glorious, and though but very little 
understood by the spiritual children that surrounded 
him, and were addressed more as absolute scientific 
and philosophical propositions to the more adult man of 
future ages, yet have been a source of consolation, 

31 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

comfort and a joy to the Christian of every age from 
that day to this, and will so continue till the end of 
time. 

For man hath a spiritual eye — ^the eye of faith. 
Webster doth not define it, yet still it is there. And 
we walk in its light — ^by faith and by sight also. It 
It is the ''Pure Reason'' of the philosopher Emanuel 
Kant. It is the lumen or light by which, when man 
hath put aside this "muddy vesture of decay," will be 
the eye by which he will see all things clearly in the 
brighter and more heavenly light of the higher worlds. 
It is in this higher, holier light that even in this life 
man sees, though dimly, as Paul has said, many of 
the deep things of the spirit that greatly console him 
for the evils of the world. 

This inability on the part of the great mass of 
human kind to understand the deep and the mighty 
things of the spirit in a rational and scientific sense 
is the chief reason why there yet remain in the various 
creeds of Christendom so many inert and insoluble 
symbolic truths that have never yet been rationally 
appropriated and digested by the great mass of man- 
kind. We say inert and insoluble, for the simple and 
very good reason that if a truth, however great it may 
happen to be, is insoluble to the intellect of man, it is 
by virtue of this fact of little value to the mind and 
the heart of man and is inert and dead — one of the 
husks of the Word. For example, the well-known 
doctrine of "Infant Damnation," after remaining in 
the Presbyterian "Confession of Faith" for some cen- 
turies, dead and inert for lack of some one to crack 
the nut and give its containments to science and the 
world of mankind, has at last been cast overboard 
by the good Presbyterian Patres. 

Now, that article of their faith was perfectly right. 
All it needed was for some one to explain its meaning 
so that Reason and Science could comprehend it. But, 
like the Myth of Adam and Eve in the book of" 
Genesis, it was highly symbolical and no one has ever 
fully solved its deep and mystic meaning. But Adam 
and Eve: What are they but the Rational and the 

32 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

Spiritual understandings of the human IntelUgence? 
Adam is the Rational Understanding (''Die Ver- 
stand f) of Emanuel Kant. Eve is Putq Reason (der 
Reinan Vernunft). Of this important faculty, as a 
class woman, who is of more spiritual make than man, 
enjoys the larger share. 

The Rational Understanding is a masculine 'organ, 
and man has a greater endowment of this, as a class, 
than has woman. When it is stated in Genesis that 
Eve partook first of the fruit of the tree of knowledge 
of good and evil, and afterward gave to Adam, and 
he also did eat thereof, it is a simple statement in 
the forms of symbolic language of an act and a fact 
in the history of the operations of the human mind 
that is as old as the world: — yea, as God himself. It 
is this feminine element in the human intelligence, 
whether it be in man or in woman in greater degree — 
though far oftener in woman — ^that first discovers and 
"eats'* all new and great truths and afterwards imparts 
them to the Rational Intelligence, and "he did eat.'' 

As to the ''Fair of man, what simpler and more 
natural explanation of this beautiful myth can be given 
than to consider the truth that man is a two-fold 
entity — ^he is both an animal and a spiritual being. 

As he partakes more and more of the spiritual foods 
— of the "tree of the knowledges of good and of evil" 
— and becomes more spiritual in his nature, the 
Adamic, or animal, man in him "falls" off from him 
as the tree sheds its bark and the serpent his skin: — 
and as the animal in him "falls" the spiritual man 
within him rises; which is true of man both racially 
and individually, and has been thus from the dawn 
of his existence upon the planet until now. 

If our worthy Presbyterian friends had only made 
an attempt to resolve this tenet of their faith — znz,^ 
"Infant Damnation" — instead of casting it overboard 
as a something likely, soon or late, to sink the ship 
if not disposed of in some way to adapt the Credo 
to the swiftly advancing opinions of mankind under 
the potent influence of progressive free thought, they 
might have lighted upon a great and mighty original 

?'? -.^ 



'MAN*S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

truth that would have gone far toward the solution of 
many other occult and vital principles in the life of 
man. For in very deed and truth and in all canbor, 
the churches, many of them whose constituents have 
lived too long and too much upon the mere husks of 
the Word, are mightily in need of a change of diet, 
for the want of which thousands are leaving the 
churches behind them, and many of them are seekinj^ 
''strange folds and pastures new." But in all sincerity 
this need not, ought not, so to be. Man is pre- 
eminently a social being and greatly needs companion- 
ship and sympathy to keep him out of evil and evil 
ways. How many a noble man has been saved by 
the love, the help and sympathy of friends when he 
was falling, and how many have been lost for the 
want of them? Yes, and many a man, and woman 
too, has been saved from moral and spiritual ship- 
wreck by still adhering to the old ship long after they 
had ceased to have any real interest and sympathy 
with the views of the ''Lights'' in command. It was 
the Social influences rather than the Spiritual that 
saved them. 

For the Church, as its name implies, is ''God's 
House," and when it is once properly adapted to the 
progressive nature of man as well as to his sympathies 
and affections, it will become and remain forever his 
spiritual guide, guard and protection in the midst of 
all the moral, social and spiritual dangers that may 
beset his pathway and allure him from the paths of 
rectitude, honor and decency. 

But the church must advance. It must put aside 
or properly explain scientifically the tough, hard 
noduses of the Creed, which are and have been for 
ages now stumbling blocks in the ways of Christians 
and non-Christians, that have kept millions out of the 
fold, and have driven out many of those already there 
when their growing intelligence would not permit 
them^ any longer to remain in it and by so doing 
indorse the awful terrors of the Creed. The character 
of our Heavenly Father as Jesus defined him to be 
and the one formulated in the Credo are not alike, but 
in utter contrast with each other, 

34 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

No human intelligence, or intelligence of any sort, 
human or divine, can reconcile them, until the sym- 
bolic sense of the Creed is put aside and we apply the 
Scientific Sense, in giving it the only true explanation 
it can have. The contrast thus displayed in the delinea- 
tion of the Divine Character as they appear in the 
plain teachin'gs of Jesus, and as they are taught in 
the Creed, is indeed terrible ! We quote Christ's words 
concerning it: ''Or what man is there of you who, 
if his son ask bread, will give him a stone; or if he 
ask fish will give him a serpent? // ye, then, being 
eznl, know how to give good gifts to your children, 
how much more shall your Father who is in Heaven 
give good things to them that ask Himf 

We present to the reader both the old and the new 
amended article concerning Reprobation as it appears 
in the Presbyterian Confession of Faith, as we find 
them in a late copy of the Outlook: 

'Tor then shall the righteous go into everlasting 
life and receive that fulness of joy and refreshing 
which shall come from the presence of the Lord. But 
the wicked who know not God and who obey not the 
gospel of His Son, Jesus Christ, shall be cast into 
eternal torments and be punished with everlasting 
destruction from the presence of the Lord and from 
the glory of his power.'' The new and amended state- 
ment of the article is in these words: 

'The wicked shall receive the eternal award of their 
sins, and the Lord will manifest the glory of his 
mercy in the salvation of his people and their entrance 
upon the full enjoyment of eternal life.'' 

'Tt is not rash to say," says this author, *'that the 
doctrine of eternal punishment is thus practically elim- 
inated from the Presbyterian Creed. Yet one may 
hold that doctrine and remain Presbyterian." 

"The whole statement will soon come to have a 
meaning to the church that would now be disputed 
by the strict constructionists. Its adoption is a revo- 
lutionary event in the doctrinal history of American 
Presbyterianism and a great triumph of Theological 
liberality." True, it is a "revolutionary event" in the 

3S 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

history of the church, and very revolutionary at that. 
The Presbyterian fathers, in their efforts to escape 
from their creedal difficulties, appear to have for- 
gotten the injunction of the Master in Matt, ix., 16-17: 
''No man putteth a piece of new cloth into an old 
garment; for that which is put in to fill it up taketh 
from the garment, and the rest is made worse. Neither 
do men put new wine into old bottles, else the bottles 
break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles 
perish. But they put new wine into new bottles, and 
both are preserved.'' 

This revolutionary step on the part of the church 
fathers appears to have been little worse than a make- 
shift to get rid of the growing clamor in the churches 
in favor of getting rid of an article of the creed that 
was fastened upon it during the dark ages of church 
authority and power, and was so manifest an insult to 
reason and to the one Supreme Being himself that it 
threatened the dissolution of the churches themselves. 

There is something truly appalling in the contem- 
plation of the Supreme Being as one who sits in un- 
approached and unapproachable majesty, power and 
wisdom at the Summit of Creation, and bringing 
worlds full of beings into existence at the breath of 
his power — beings, too, endowed with the most ex- 
quisite sense of pain and of pleasure — and consigning 
them to eternal torment, and for no other assigned or 
assignable reason than his ability to do it. We search 
history and world in vain to find a parallel for such 
a Being. The only one that we can put into a com- 
parison with this picture of the character of the 
Supreme Being is the ancient Myth of Saturn, which, 
when interpreted literally, as it was in former times, 
became a subject of much aversion and ridicule; but 
as now understood in the light of modern science, 
takes its place as a beautiful picture, given in symbolic 
language, of the way in which Old Father Time dis- 
poses of his children — the minutes, the hours, the 
days, months, years and ages, as they pass, and bury 
themselves in the vast abysm of time. 

But this Myth of the ''Reprobation" of his own dear, 

36 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

blind, ignorant children, and casting them into end- 
less torment; and the even more irrational teaching of 
the doctrine of 'Infant Damnation'' — whence came 
they but from the too literal interpretation of the text 
of the Divine Word itself by the spiritually ignorant 
child-man of the primitive ages of the early church? 
Had our good Presbyterian Patres had the courage 
and the light to come forward and give to the modern 
world a scientific unraveling and exposition of these 
two very important Arcana of the Word, they would 
have conferred a great and lasting benefit upon all 
human kind. But they failed to accept the proffered 
occasion, and their final solution has been handed 
down to the next generation, which will be farther ad- 
vanced and more heedful of the mandates of Reason 
and of the just opinions of mankind. And it will then 
be made plain, and in a philosophic and scientific way. 
We have very high authority in the teachings of the 
Master for this view of the origin of these Myths : 

"And his disciples came and said unto him: Why 
speakest thou unto them in parables (symbols) ? 

''He answered and said unto them: Because it is 
given unto you to know the mysteries of the kingdom 
of Heaven : But unto them it is not given. Therefore 
speak I unto them in parables: because they seeing, 
see not (spiritually) and hearing, hear not (spirit- 
ually), neither do they understand (spiritually). 

"But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your 
ears, for they hear." But this inability of the disciples 
of Jesus to comprehend spiritual things was not 
wholly true of them — at least, not to all of them, and 
of some of the more obvious Arcana of the Word. 

At a later occasion, when he presented to the Jewish 
mAiltitude and to his disciples also those beautiful, 
symbolic pictures concerning the eating of his flesh and 
drinking of his blood, many of his disciples said : "This 
is a hard saying; who can hear it? * * * So that from 
that time many of his disciples v/ent back and walked 
no more with him." The truth is there are Arcana 
and arcana, and some are easily soluble, while others 

37 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

are more difficult of solution, and are obliged to wait 
for their solution in an age that is more advanced in 
spiritual things, and aided also by the lights of a 
true science, but not a pseicdo-sciencey of which man- 
kind has been afflicted too much already. 

But what is the true Intent and meaning of this 
very remarkable and terrible Myth of ''Infant Dam- 
nation" — the eternal damnation of little, infant chil- 
dren, those whom Christ, on more than one occasion, 
set them before his disciples as the very highest models, 
as citizens of the Kingdom of Heaven? ''And they 
brought unto him also infants that he would teach 
them. But when his disciples saw it they rebuked 
them. But Jesus called them unto him and said: 
"Suflfer little children to come unto me, and forbid 
them not, for of such is the Kingdom of God. Verily 
I say unto you, Whosoever shall not receive the King- 
dom of God as a little child, shall in no wise enter 
therein/' And again: "At the same time came the 
disciples unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in 
the Kingdom of Heaven ? 

"And Jesus called a little child unto him, and set 
him in the midst of them and said : Verily I say unto 
you, except ye be converted and become as little chil- 
dren ye shall not enter the Kingdom of Heaven. 

"Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this 
little child, the same is greatest in the Kingdom of 
Heaven, and whoso shall receive one such little child 
in my name receiveth me." It is such dear beings 
as these, so precious to the heart of the beloved 
teacher, that theology would consign to eternal dam- 
nation ! Could spiritual antithesis, untruth and un- 
reason further go? 

Yes, it is very true, as science hath declared: "The 
Universe is governed by Law." But Law is but an 
expression of the Modus Vivendi of the Infinite 
Divine Being whom we call God. 

The Universe is a manifold and many-sided Being, 
and all who desire to formulate some picture of Him 
to aid the mind in the contemplation of His character 

38 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

use manifold terms of definition, as the artist who 
attempts to define a vast mountain takes his object 
from many viewpoints. 



THE EVERLASTING GOSPEL. 

"And I saw another Angel fly in the midst of 
Heaven having the everlasting gospel to preach unto 
them that dwell on the earth and to every nation and 
kindred and tongue and people, saying with a loud 
voice : Fear God and give glory to Him : for the hour 
of His judgment is come: and worship Him that 
made Heaven and earth and the sea, and the fountains 
of waters/' 

But this "Everlasting Gospel'' is not the gospel 
of Ancient Theology, which is based upon the partial 
and symbolical sense of the Word, but is founded 
upon its scientific and spiritual sense. 

Theology is but the preliminary and preparatory 
Gospel, the literal or A, B, C Department of human 
life and thought, that, like the preparatory depart- 
ment of the school and the college, are designed to get 
the pupils more fully equipped and prepared to enter 
the higher classes and departments of science and 
philosophy. 

The Divine Word, as it was delivered to mankind 
by the great teacher, and practically embodied all that 
was essential in the teachings of all the great Reform- 
ers of mankind who had preceded him, was given to 
man in what may be termed an involved and dual 
form, viz., the literal or symbolical sense of the Word, 
and the spiritual or the full scientific sense. 

In this dual arrangement of the involved forms of 
the Word the literal and Symbolical sense are neces- 
sarily obliged to occult and in greatest degree to con- 
ceal the interior and spiritual forms of the Word, 

39 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

which lie within and behind the literal forms thereof, 
and constitute a dense, dark veil — the flesh — through 
which but few of the bright rays of the spiritual 
sense of the Word penetrate or pass. So that the 
person who is living in earthly life forms is in this 
way shut up within his own material body as in a 
sort of poison, through which he gets only partial 
gleams of the full spiritual light that come to him 
through the dense shell that invests him on every side. 

'Tor now we see as through a dark glass. But 
then'' — after the demise of the material body — "face 
to face." 

This is peculiarly true of the lower forms of the 
racial infant, spiritual man, whose spiritual body is 
made up almost wholly of animal knowledges and 
life forms, so that, like his original prototype that is 
spoken of in Genesis, he is destitute of the moral sense 
of right and wrongs and remains in that spiritual 
estate until he has eaten of the fruit of the "tree of 
knowledge of good and evil'' which he, as an animal 
many is forbidden to eat, and for the obvious reason 
that these higher knowledges of good and ill, if used 
freely by the animal man, soon dissolves, breaks up 
and destroys his Hfe principles, and he is soon en route 
to death. It is for this reason, also, that many men and 
women of a high order of intelligence, and who are 
rapidly growing in a knowledge of spiritual things, are 
much troubled with disorders of the animal functions 
of the body. It is one of the natural consequences 
of that slow, gradual decomposition of the animal 
man that necessarily attends the spiritual transforma- 
tion that takes place in the spiritual man (or body) 
whereby he is enabled, soon or late, to slough off the 
old Adamic man with all his gross foods, deeds, appe- 
tites and desires and to "put on — clothe himself with — 
the new man, which has been renewed in spiritual 
knowledges after the image (and likeness) of Him 
that created him." 

That this was the form of death that the Adamic 
man was warned against by his Creator, and not the 
loss of his material body by what we ordinarily term 

4Q 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

death, will become apparent if we take the statements 
of the Bible as our authority. For according to that 
account Adam (which means an earth man) did not 
die as to his material body, but lived in it for many 
hundreds of years afterward, ''and beget sons and 
daughters.'' 

For the Adamic or primeval men of the planet were 
not men of a very high order, but the very reverse. 
They were the very earliest and rudest forms of 
human life, and but two or three removes from the 
animal world out of which they had come up by recent 
incarnations. 

They were little more than mere animals by nature, 
differing from them chiefly in their more erect and 
manlike forms, but with the moral and mental status 
of animals, though with the outward "image and like- 
ness" of the Gods — ^that is, of men. 

The Spirit of Intelligences, however, reckon the 
Gorilla and the Anthropoid Apes as the lowest forms 
of primitive man, and the ''missing link'' in the chain 
of being from animal to man. 

That we have given the true sense of the term 
"Everlasting Gospel," given in the words of the 
text, Rev. xiv., 6, will become manifest if we reflect 
carefully upon its true spiritual rendering of the 
whole passage. For the Angel does not command men 
to worship the God of theology, but the God that is 
revealed in and by his works. "Fear God and give 
glory to him: for the hour of his judgment is come: 
and worship him that made Heaven and earth and 
the sea and the fountains of waters,'' viz., the God of 
Science, of Astronomy, of Geology, of Philosophy and 
of Reason. 

If there be anything among all the knowledges of 
man that inspires in him the passions of unutterable 
love, adoration, worship, it is a contemplation of the 
Creator as exemplified and revealed in his works, 
"An undevout astronomer is mad," says the poet 
Young. And it is this God that men everywhere are 
commanded to worship. 

Yes, the Angel, in preaching the new and ''ever- 

41 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

lasting Gosper' to all that dwell on the earth, and to 
e^/ery kindred and nation and tongue and people/' 
virtually enjoins upon all mankind that they no longer 
worship the God of Theology — the God that was taken 
from the Word when used in its narrow, symbolical 
sense — useful and even indispensable to the worship 
and to the welfare of man in the early periods of his 
existence, when he had the spiritual understanding 
of an infant, but now no longer useful, because he 
has outgrown them ; so that now, in dwelling in these 
very narrow forms and uses of the Word, they terribly 
cramp his whole spiritual man and greatly retard his 
spiritual growth in all things. 

Yes, this is what the new ''Everlasting GospeF' doth 
not accomplish for mankind. It places no fetters on 
the human mind — the worship of this "God that made 
Heaven and earth and the sea, and the fountains of 
waters." It only uplifts the soul into a transport of 
love, worship and communion with an adorable Cre- 
ator and Father, and enables him to realize that he 
is indeed a veritable child of his — a son of the Infinite 
God himself. ''Oh, God," said the great astronomer, 
Kepler, as he was demonstrating the law^s governing 
the planets in their everlasting flight about their great 
centre, the sun — "Oh, God, I am thinking thy thoughts 
after Thee!" And this is indeed the "hour," the 
fact and truth of his "judgment." Who that hath 
reflected much upon the vast inequalities and dis- 
crepancies that everywhere exist in human life hath 
not often had the sensibilities, yea, the very soul of 
him, bowed down with sorrow and anguish, and even 
filled with rebellion at what to him appears to be 
the injustice and unfairness of the Creator in his allot- 
ments of human destinies? 

But if we will only be patient, and call to our aid 
the lights of true science to guide us in our investi- 
gations, we shall shortly discover that these vast dis- 
crepancies and differences that we see around us on 
every side are not to be regarded in the light of in- 
equalities in any just and proper sense of that term, 

4^ 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

but are disciplinary in their character and belong to 
the lower incarnations of the human plane. 

There are so vast a proportion of mankind who 
are living in the lower and first incarnations, and who 
are incapable of looking into the great mirror of 
Life and seeing themselves as others see them. But 
time and repeated re-embodiments will, in God's good 
time, bear them up on to the higher and more benefi- 
cent planes of being. This little world of ours, when 
its people have once fully entered upon the new civ- 
ilization in its higher and more perfect forms, will 
become an important sanitarium for the reincarnation 
and renewal of the bodies-^both material and spirit- 
ual — of those who had lost them by a premature in- 
carnation. How many a poor, spiritually sick human 
soul has been hunted to his grave, dying upon the 
scaffold or in the midst of the curses and tortures 
inflicted by the maddened and howling mob, who 
during his whole lifetime had striven vastly harder to 
stem the torrent of his appetites and passions than 
other thousands who have died in the ''odor of 
sanctity," and with their ears ringing with the ap- 
plause of millions ? The vast differences and inequali- 
ties of every kind that exist among mankind is due 
to their lack of advancement. They have not been run 
through the ''Mills of the Gods'' as often as others. 

When they have built themselves up by as manifold 
reincarnations as a Christ, a Buddha or a Lincoln, they 
will become endowed with an equal, if not an even 
possibly greater, power and ability. 

Much depends upon the person, the work for which 
he is being prepared and the aid he gets from the 
powers above him. 

And yet all of them were equally the handiwork of 
the same Infinite, Almighty Creator, Lord of the 
Heavens and the earth, and bear his own sign manual 
engraven upon every line and atom of their being! 

Shall we say with certain ones of the older times, 
"The way of the Lord is not equal"? No! By no 
means whatsoever* 

43 



MAiYS PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

Christ, who better understood the secret laws that 
operate on mankind, bid his followers pierce their 
enemies through the heart in the spiritual sense of that 
word, as being not only the surest but the morally 
safest and the best for all parties concerned. "Father, 
forgive them, for they know not what they do," 

And in what way can we do a weak, ignorant and 
sick brother a gi-eater service than to open his spiritus; 
eyes in this instructive and saving way? Jesus him- 
self put these grand and noble principles into prac- 
tice under circumstances the most appalling, perhaps, 
that ever fell to the lot of man. 

But the greatest, the sublimest of the moral forces 
that are concerned in all such cases comes to the man 
who forgives. The Angel calls the attention of the 
world to this message, which we have just quoted, 
and which he has been authorized to preach to man- 
kind. It is the announcement of the ending up of the 
old Dispensation with all its ancient and imperfect 
forms, ceremonies, modes and phases of thought and 
action, and the formal introduction of the new 
Millenial Era and Dispensation, now near at hand, if 
there be any truth in the present strange and mar- 
velous "Signs of the Times.'' 

But man is a Creature and not a Creator, nor 
self made. He came up through and out of the 
animal world, which in its infinity of life forms had 
gestated man in his more primeval estates and con- 
ditions and were the stepping stones by which, under 
the directive energies of the Divine Mind, had enabled 
man to ascend through, from and out of the various 
orders, classes and species of the lower worlds of life 
on to the higher planes and spheres of his manifold 
and marvelous being. 

Oh, if man only knew the real causes of these so 
wonderful, so strange, and yet so absolutely indis- 
pensable differences in the lives and the fortunes of 
their fellow men! Not ''Total Depravity'' or any 
other variety or species of Badness. But for the 
simple reason that the Creator of men, of worlds and 
their civilizations, like all other persons, requires Time 

44 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

as one of the indispensable factors of Creative energy 
in the creation of man and his worlds, and plenty of 
it, too — first as an animal of a low type and order, 
second as one of a higher rank or physical man, and 
third as a spiritual being, or man in all his infinity of 
modes, forms, conditions and estates of existence. 

But these spiritual forms and degrees of his being 
can only be attained by long ages of earnest life and 
work; manifold Reincarnations in terrestrial estates 
under disciplinary conditions, followed by long ages 
spent in spiritual soul life, devoted to the culture 
and growth of the spiritual side of him until he shall 
have attained the Godhood in the higher and highest 
forms of the Divine life of man and of God — after 
he has sloughed the last vestige of the animal and has 
ascended on to the higher planes of immortality and 
everlasting life! But while he remains upon the 
lower animal planes of being, there is one side of his 
nature that will always respond more or less to all 
appeals to the animal nature within him. It is the 
human'^ side of him. 

It is for those manifold and manifest reasons that 
Jesus enjoined upon his followers in that greatest of 
all his discourses on human ethics: "Ye have heard 
that it hath been said, 'Thou shalt love thy neighbor 
and hate thine enemy* But I say unto you: Love 
your enemies: bless them that curse you: do good to 
them that hate you and pray for them that despitefully 
use you and persecute you !" 

Thus it is to "bruise'' the head of the serpent of 
man's selfishness, and then in turn to assist our offend- 
ing brother — if he will permit us to help crush it also 
in himself; for by thus giving the Adamic or animal 
man a free hand, we disarm him and make a strong 
appeal to his nobler nature to come forth and assert 
itself.^ 

This was what Christ did when he voluntarily 
sought the Jewish authorities and gave himself up to 

*The word human is from homo, and this in turn 
comes from humus — soil, earth. 

45 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

be put upon the Cross, where the worlds could behold 
him hanging upon the Cross in illustration of that 
divine, world-compelling principle that years before he 
had announced in his sublime ''Sermon on the Mount," 
and afterwards converted it into a grand object lesson 
to instruct, uplift and overcome the passions, hatreds 
and angers of the worlds and the ages of mankind. 
And that is what he is accomplishing now at this very 
time. His great and glorious example and words, 
holding thus the mirror up to divine nature, fur- 
nishes a center of crystallization for the Amorphic and 
disorderly masses of mankind, that as a point of attrac- 
tion grows more potent and commanding as the years 
and the ages roll onward. 

Could the Great Teacher have taken singly the mob 
that put him on the Cross, they could never, any one 
of them, have touched a hair of his head. It was the 
hydra of the mob that crucified Him, whose mutual 
hatreds and passions were whetting each other, and 
gave no opportunity for poor, weak, human nature to 
assert itself. But it killed poor Judas at the first shot. 

We could give many examples of the operation of 
this divine, holy principle in human life, but will con- 
tent ourself with a single one. Sir Walter Raleigh 
was at one time challenged to fight a duel by a rash, 
hot-headed young man, who had taken some high 
offence at him. Raleigh refused to fight him, where- 
upon the young man spat in his face ! 

Taking out his handkerchief he calmly and delib- 
erately wiped it off. ''Young man,'' said he, ''if I could 
as easily wipe your blood from my conscience as I 
can remove this indignity from my face, I would this 
instant take your life!" 

But such an exhibition of heroic forbearance and 
self-restraint was more than the arrogance of the 
young man could bear up under, and he immediately 
fell upon his knees and begged the forgiveness of the 
old hero. It is this moral grandeur of soul, this sub- 
limity of compassion, sympathy and affection, that is 
the glory of the human character. ''In hoc signo." 
Yes, it is truly in this that we must conquer. 

46 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

And if I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw 
all men unto me." It is the spiritual leaven that, 
descending from the sublime heights of Divine Love, 
tenderness and compassion, that in God's all good 
time will become the whole race of mankind. 

''Master, who did sin this man or his parents that 
he was thus born blind?" ''Neither hath this man 
sinned nor his parents: But that the works of God 
should be made manifest in him." What! is God 
the author of evil? Yea, verily it is just as the be- 
loved Jesus taught his disciples in regard to this un- 
fortunate blind man. '1 form the light and create 
darkness. I make peace and create evU, I, the Lord, 
do all these things.'' 

Yes, and not until we have mastered the infinite 
problem of how the eternal God is, as stated by Jesus 
and Isaiah, the author of all things, can we begin 
to comprehend the vastness of His plans for the Cre- 
ation and Salvation of mankind. 

If now we have the candor and the freedom of soul 
to admit the mighty truth of the statement thus laid 
down and established by the great Teacher, we may 
begin to see that crime itself is less a fault than a mis- 
fortune. Indeed, the greater the crime the greater the 
misfortune. 

Did not the wise Socrates say: "Vice is ignorance" 
(concrete) and "Virtue is knowledge" — yea, organic 
knowledge ? We must lift up the sinner, first into the 
light of our intelligence and afterward into the light 
of our love, sympathy and compassion. And if it be a 
real misfortune to be born blind physically, how much 
greater a misfortune must it be to be born morally 
and spiritually blind! 

We necessarily regard such a being as a Durant or 
a Holmes as a moral monster, and so he is. But the 
causes that created them were put into them before 
they were born. They themselves were greater victims 
than were their victims. Their crimes were but an 
expression in time and world of forces most of which 
were put into them before they were born. The latter 

47 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

.were innocent people, who, upon entrance into spirit 
life, went and joined their friends in that life, and 
there was the end to their misfortunes. The former, 
on entering into the other life, went into a state of 
terrible darkness, sorrow and remorse from which 
it may require ages to fully recover. 

The treatment by society of these waifs of the two 
worlds is in general of the very worst. Instead of being 
calculated to ''plant eyes'' in the moral and spiritual 
nature of man, it does the other thing. It maddens 
and blinds them to the light, beauty, grandeur and 
glories of the moral and the spiritual universes of 
the living God and Father of all mankind. Society 
lights upon a man with very weak and imperfect sight. 
It shuts him up in one of those abodes of moral and 
spiritual darkness called prisons^ where they contrive 
to put out what little sight was in him. 

We must preach and practice, too, this higher, 
newer, nobler ''Everlasting Gosper that the Angel 
which John saw ''flying in the midst of Heaven'' was 
commissioned to preach unto all that dwell on the 
earth, and to every nation and kindred and tongue and 
people." 

This expression, "Flying in the midst of the 
Heavens,'' does not refer to spatial conditions, but to 
the religious and philosophical conditions and estates. 
Christianity, when it has once passed beyond its pres- 
ent symbolical conditions and has been expanded into 
its philosophical and scientific phases, will become a 
universal religion and philosophy in one, and the war- 
fare that has existed through the ages between science 
and religion will forever end. And the New Christ- 
ianity will become the Central Religion of Humanity, 
and identical with civilization itself. 

Yes, how sublimely grand and glorious will be that 
religion when it hath cast off the child clothing im- 
posed upon it by the infant spiritual understanding of 
the early ages, has put on the dress of manhood, and 
no longer worships the spectres of a dead and dying 
theology, and "worships Him that made the Heavens 
and the earth and the sea and the fountains of waters." 

48 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

It is the "New (spiritual) Heavens and the New 
Earth" that John saw in his vision, ''wherein dwelleth 
righteousness/' 



IN THE BEGINNING. 

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the 
earth/' 

If we are to assume that this statement in Genesis 
is a veritable inspiration from the sages of spirit Hfe — 
and we see no good reason to doubt it, despite all the 
animadversions of infant and very fallible human 
science — we are by no means obliged to take this word 
"beginning" in any absolute sense; but, on the con- 
trary, in a very limited and finite one. Worlds, like 
men and all other created beings, have a "beginning" — 
are born into existence, run through all the various 
stages of their various life forms, grow old and die. 
But the infinite and the absolute eternal have not 
either beginning or ending, save in the forms of life 
through which all its children, born of time, are 
obliged to pass. 

We must ever bear in mind, too, that all inspired 
communications from the high spheres from which 
all true inspiration comes is very highly symbolical, 
and it is very necessary for him who would rightly 
interpret symbols to get back behind and to find the 
real and the true and the full meaning of the symbols 
God purposes to more fully reveal to mankind. 

For what, let us here ask the question, is a symbol? 

It is one of the sides (only) of a many-sided truth — 
too many sided for the infant spiritual man to compre- 
hend in its entireness, and so the sages of the higher 
worlds place it before him in "installments" of the 
Divine Word, that he can better comprehend, and 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

keep him drilling away at so much of the whole mean- 
ing as he can fully grasp, and keeps him at it until 
he hungers for something more and better. The two 
knights in the fable who passed by the shield set in 
the middle of the road, but went by it on opposite 
sides of it, and came near splitting each other's skulls 
over the question, what sort of a shield it was, whether 
a golden or a silver one, supply us with a very good 
illustration of the wav men of half truths are often 
obliged to wrangle over complex and many-sided prin- 
ciples — ''and worry and devour each other" over their 
true meaning, where each of the parties involved are 
looking at them from different standpoints all the 
while. ''Most men are but halves and quarters of men, 
and, misunderstanding, accuse each other," said a wise 
Frenchman. 

The picture of a human being is but an example of 
one of these symbols of poly-sided truths, one of which 
is given in the picture, while the others -are invisible 
from the present viewpoint of the beholders. All 
other sides of the question, What is man, whether 
exterior or interior sides of it, are invisible to the 
eye from the present position, and will forever remain 
so until the beholder shall have shifted his standpoint 
on to higher planes of being. 

"So all grow old and die." 

It is the voice of Nature — ^the ultimate destiny of 
all created beings, whether material or spiritual. For, 
as already shown, creation is only another name for 
organization — the putting into organic forms of use 
the great, raw, inorganic forces of the universe; and 
when they have fully subserved that use — have ex- 
hausted these life forms of their utility — they die. 
Otherwise they would be in the way of new forms 
destined to take their place when fully matured. 

The sun, that traverses "space" with manifold times 
the velocity of the swiftest cannon ball, to procure 
the raw materials upon which he subsists, and warms 
and lights the giant worlds that are anchored to him, 
not only accomplishes this vast and important function 
in this way, but by the same procedure he frees him- 

50 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

self from the ashes of his fires (electro-magnetic), 
which would otherwise extinguish them, and in this 
manner would soon destroy all life not only upon our 
own little world, but upon all the other worlds that 
are warmed, illuminated and sustained by the solar 
orb in his long an4 mighty journey through the depths 
of space. 

For the great and glorious sun does not, as science 
has wrongly declared, feed his dependent worlds with 
foods and forces derived from a self consumption of 
his own materials, as mariners are sometimes forced 
to consume portions of the ship that is to bear them 
home for lack of other fuel to keep them warm. It 
is a function and not a consumption of his own ma- 
terials that suppHes him with the vital forces and foods 
that sustain his eternal fires, both for himself and all 
his worlds, and these foods and forces are not wasted 
and exhausted in a vain effort to heat up all surround- 
ing space, as science would have it. But, being of a 
magnetic and electric character, are drawn out by an 
electric attraction simply to the worlds themselves, and 
only in sufficient amounts to chemicalize and convert 
them into caloric heat and light within the atmos- 
pheres of the various worlds that are dependent upon 
him for their daily foods, but wastes none of his forces 
to illuminate and warm up the vast cold regions of 
space that those worlds occupy. He gathers up the 
raw materials of his foods both from surrounding 
space and from the infinite life forces that eternally 
flow into him from Deity Himself. According to the 
statements of those who have made the ascent of high 
mountains, it gets colder and darker as one ascends. 
The farther one gets above the earth and toward the 
sun, the thinner become the atmospheric forces that 
chemicalize the solar rays and convert them into heat 
and light, so that when the traveller has attained a 
great height he sees the sun as quite a dull orb that has 
to a great extent put aside the intense and painful 
character of his rays, so that even at midday of the 
brightest days it becomes colder and darker, much 
like the twilight. 

SI 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

Another of the serious errors of science, as it seems 
to us, Hes in the supposition that the planets situated 
most remote from the sun must of necessity enjoy but 
a small amount of light and heat from him. 

But if we consider the fact that the amount of heat 
and light enjoyed by the people of these distant worlds 
does not come to these worlds in the form of absolute 
heat and light, but, as we have seen, in the forms of 
electro-magnetism, and that these rays of the solar 
orb are attracted to the various worlds in kind and 
quantity, and in proportion to the conditions of the 
atmospheres of those worlds, why then it becomes 
plain to see that an infinite and all wise Creator, who 
himself dwelleth in and is ''light ineffable," will have 
no difficulty whatever in constituting these atmospheres 
chemically to make compensation for the distances of 
the various planetary bodies, both new and remote 
from the su», by graduating the light-producing ele- 
ments in each atmosphere, not only in harmony with 
the distances, but also with the sizes of the orbs that, 
with the sun, constitute our solar system. Otherwise 
it would be quite impossible for the Creator to get up 
a well-ordered and well-arranged system in which 
some of its inhabitants should not suffer from excess 
of heat and light while others would experience great 
inconvenience from the opposite conditions of cold 
and darkness. 

It is a great mercy to mankind that the worlds were 
created by an infinite and all-wise God and not by the 
materialist with his chance-world and pull-haul of mud. 

''I do not see any God in your system of creation," 
said Napoleon to Laplace, who had presented him with 
a statement of his views upon the ''Nebular Theory 
of Worlds." "Sire, it does not require any God," 
replied Laplace. 

And yet it is said of the great astronomer that he 
never uttered the name of the Supreme Being without 
removing his hat ! 

Said a warm devotee of the ''Nebular Theory" of 
the origin of worlds, "Given matter and gravity, and 
all the rest is easy," referring to this half law, half 
chance theory of creating worlds. 

52 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

Just as if gravity could so proteize itself by acting 
at one time in its usual way of seeking the center of the 
cooling, contracting body; and again, ''presto, change!" 
switching off, side tracking a ring of matter from the 
mass of the cooling body, and arresting its movement 
centerward and allowing the balance of the mass to 
continue on, fixes it stationary as to the retreating 
mass, rolls up the ring into a sphere and repeats 
these self-transformations at certain way stations along 
the path of the cooling, retreating mass in accordance 
with a law indicated by the astronomer Bode! 

Could distress itself go farther in its extremity to 
find a substitute for the directive intelligence, wisdom 
and power of an eternal God? 

The account given in Genesis of the creation of the 
world is a beautiful myth, and a very general state- 
ment of the order of procedure employed by the cre- 
ative wisdoms (let us make mian) in the evolution of 
our dear old Mother Earth — and very likely similar to 
the methods pursued in the creation of all other 
worlds. 

Materialism, fresh from the labors of concocting new 
and strange laws for getting rid of an intelligent, all- 
v/ise Creator, by ostracizing Him from^ His ovvm glori- 
ous works, ridicule' the idea of creating a great w^orld 
like this in six days! But the fault lies in a great 
m.easure at their own doors. Not being able to pene- 
trate beneath the literal and symbolical sense of word, 
they take the symbol for the entire fact and laugh 
at their own mistakes. 

The geologists of spirit life inform me that the "day'' 
spoken of in Genesis is not our diurnal one of twenty- 
four hours, but an astro-geological one of 750,000 of 
our years ! So that the time included in the ''six days" 
amounts to four and a half millions of years, which 
is quite a long period, even in ofeological time. 
But if we consider the fact that this creative period 
snoken of in Genesis does not bes"in until a time that 
is after the work of constructing the planet has pretty 
well advanced, the part remaining to be done being 
chiefly the evolution of vegetable and animal life on 

53 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

down to the time when man made his appearance 
upon the world, we shall discover that this 4,500,000 
of years is but a part, and possibly a small part, 
assigned by the creative wisaoms in the creation of the 
world and in the development of its flora and fauna. 

This will become more apparent if we reflect that 
the manifold and varied forms of plant and animal 
life that inhabit the globe are not the result of infinite 
ages of infinitesimal increments of change; but are 
due to transformations that take place within the brief 
cycles of months and even days, as we see them con- 
stantly taking place in the plant and animal life about 
us in the less permanent species or varieties of animal 
And vegetable life of the world. 

No more conscientious and painstaking scientist has 
ever wrought in his field of labor than Mr. Darwin, 
to whom the world is vastly indebted for the work 
he accomplished in removing the shackles from the 
limbs of science, and made it safe for the honest in- 
vestigator to freely pursue the paths of science without 
fear of auto da fe! 

But Mr. Darwin, after a long life spent in experi- 
menting, could never produce a single permanent 
species. But what are varieties other than variable 
species, some of which in truth are very difficult to 
make vary? And it may possibly be true that had 
Mr. Darwin been permitted to carry on his investiga^ 
tions much longer he might have found one. But his 
inability to discover any may be due to some law 
of parsimony in nature, due to the fact that such 
changeless forms of plant and animal life were created 
in the early ages of the world before its soils had 
become receptive of those stimuli that impart higher 
and more prolific powers of generation to the indi- 
vidual. But however that may be, we deem reincar- 
nation to be the ample, absolute and perfect law. that 
underlies the entire subject of the variations and other 
changes that take place in vegetal, animal and 
human life, and the principle involved in which ex- 
tends also to the higher and more perfect metamor- 
phoses that exist upon the higher planes of spiritual 

54 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

and celestial life. For the Supreme Being is one and 
the law under which He reveals Himself is also one, 
but one that manifests itself under infinite variations — 
one of the illogical theories that have conie down 
to us from the infancy of the race. 

Indeed, if this theory be true, why, then, this vast 
universe of the living, infinite God that hath hitherto 
been regarded as also infinite, both in numbers and in 
extent is in reality growing in both these respects at 
an amazing rate, i. e., in population and in extent y 
for the one necessarily implies the other. In other 
words, if this infimity of worlds that we behold in every 
part of the sidereal heavens are employed in the same 
or similar office as our own ; if they are nurseries and 
kindergartens for the creation of new men and new 
women — and from all that we can learn of them this 
appears to be the office which they are destined by their 
Creator to fulfill — why, then the human mind is unable 
to escape from a conviction either that the spiritual 
worlds whither all these vast Amazons and ]\Iississippis 
of population that come from these unnumbered worlds 
go to discharge their infinite multitudes of "waters" — 
these spiritual worlds also must, like the vast new 
populations they are destined to provide room for, be 
growing and extending in a marvellous rate ! Or that 
the life of each of these new beings is of comparatively 
limited duration, and finds somewhere, some wdien and 
somehow another end to this cycle of our existence, 
where it can pass out of it and thus relieve the vvonder- 
ful plethora created by the vast crowd of nevv^ beings 
that are forever pressing upward, on to the higher 
planes of existence from the worlds below ! We in 
truth can see no logical way to escape from such illogi- 
cal and untenable theories concerning the purposes and 
uses that man is evidently designed by the Creator to 
fulfill in the functions and forces of universal life. 

The words, ''In the beginning," refer not to the com- 
mencement of absolute or infinite time, as has already 
been shown, for no such absolute "beginning" has ever 
taken place nor could take place. For if the universe 
or God ever had to begin in order to exist at all, what 

55 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

was there anywhere at that time, if we may be allowed 
the expression, out of which to create a God, and who 
was there to do the work? 

The greatest and most terrible mystery of all life 
is how it ever came to exist at all; how there came 
to be any God, any universe whatever. In the pres- 
ence of so insoluble and unsearchable a mystery the 
loftiest spirit of man forever folds its wings and bov/s 
its head! We can only rationally conclude from a 
careful study of His manifold and marvellous works 
that He is all wise, infinite, eternal, omnipotent and 
unchangeable as to general laws by which He admin- 
isters the worlds, but that this fixed and stable con- 
dition of the forces that go to make up His Being do 
not interfere with any reasonable understanding of 
His freedom of action in the afifairs of creation, since 
it is in the light of such freedom of work that He 
reveals Himself to all His children, the Father to the 
Son, the whole unto the part, since the Father could 
in no way fully disclose Himself to His child without 
stamping upon his tender, infantile nature the prin- 
cipal forms and characters of His own immutable and 
eternal being. 

One of the seemingly insuperable obstacles in the 
way of believing and accepting the views of those 
who entertain the notion that every human being that 
is incarnated in this terrestrial life of ours is a 
veritable ''novits homo'' or nezv man, that has never 
had an existence in past ages, but is destined to live on 
eternally in the future. For if this view of things be 
the right one, and if all other worlds are performing 
a like office, viz., are engaged in the work of creating 
new beings, new men and women, who are destined to 
live and move on in an unending cycle that hath one 
end, viz., an absolute beginning, but will never be able 
to find another or terminus. 



56 



MAN'S PLAQE IN THE KOSMOS, 



DO THE SCRIPTURES TEACH 
REINCARNATION? 

"I am the root and the offspring of David, and the bright 
and morning star." — Rev. xxii., i6. 

In treating this doctrine of the Reincarnations of 
Man, it will be our purpose to pass by many of those 
passages in the Bible v^hich are held by some to teach 
this doctrine, and which, if they are really designed 
to do so, refer to it in quite a vague and uncertain 
way and thus partially destroy the force of other pas- 
sages in it whose meaning is so plain and obvious 
that their true intent and meaning can hardly be mis- 
taken. And probably no better text can be found 
to begin with than the one that relates to the man who 
was born blind and was cured by Jesus, and concern- 
ing whom His disciples came to Him afterward and 
inquired: ''Who did sin, this man or his parents that 
he was (thus) born blind?" Jesus replies to the ques- 
tion that was put to him by His disciples by placing the 
responsibility where it justly belongs, viz., by the Cre- 
ator Himself, who made him. 

There is yet another question that comes up in con- 
nection with this inquiry of the disciples, and just now 
is one that we moderns at least feel a deeper interest 
in than in the other, and that one is the implied 
question of pre-existence and reincarnation that is in- 
directly involved in it, viz., whether this loss of sight 
in the blind man was the result of some crime or other 
sin that the person had been guilty of in some prior 
existence. 

But the inquiry put by the disciples is one that could 
have been advanced by one who fully believed not only 
in the Oriental doctrine of pre-existence, but also in 
its companion doctrine of the reincarnations of man. 

It not only implied a belief in these all important 
views concerning the life of man on the part of the 

57 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

disciples, but more than all this it implied such a belief 
on the part of Jesus himself, and also a further belief 
on their part that Jesus so believed and that they 
had been made aware of the fact from the character of 
His previous teachings. 

No one not a believer in these doctrines could have 
asked such a question, and no one who was so great 
and distinguished a teacher of mankind as was Jesus 
could have failed to correct the views of His disciples 
upon so vital a point, involving as it did the entire 
spiritual interests of the human race. To have omitted 
so important an occasion to correct the opinions of 
His disciples would have been a serious mistake, if not 
worse, against the very highest spiritual interests of 
mankind, His disciples included, whose teacher plenipo- 
tentiary He professed Himself to be."^ 

This entire silence on the part of Jesus regarding 
so great and vital a doctrine in religion and philosophy 
can leave very little doubt in the minds of all candid 
men that He fully agreed w^ith His disciples in these 
views, which were held not only by all intelligent Jews, 
Greeks and Romans who were the contemporaries of 
Jesus, but was, moreover, the leading belief among all 
the civilized nations of His times, and still continues 
to be such down to the present time. 

If it be so great a heresy as the church of to-day 
would have us believe, how would it have been pos- 
sible for Jesus to have failed to seize the important 
occasion thus offered Him to set not only His disciples, 
but the whole Christian world, right in these so radical 
and vitally important doctrines? 

A single brief sentence from Him at the time would 
have settled the question for all Christendom and for 
all time. 



* "I am come a light into the world that they that see 
not might see and they that see might be made blind." Such 
is the tenor of all His claims concerning Himself, and to have 
omitted the opportunity to set His disciples right upon so 
vital a question, and the world through them, was something 
more than a mistake. It would have been a betrayal of 
civilization itself! 

58 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

But the doctrines of pre-existence and reincarnation 
are held forth in the Scriptures not alone by indirect 
testimony of even the strongest kind. Neither does it 
lean upon a single text for its support, but upon many, 
and in the plainest words that human language can 
give utterance to. 

In Jeremiah, chap, i., 5, we find this passage: ''Be- 
fore I formed thee in the belly I knew thee, and before 
thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and 
ordained thee a prophet unto the nations/' 

Surely, those are words plain enough so that he who 
*'runs may read.'' Referring to John the Baptist as rep- 
resenting the prophet Elijah as Elias by incarnation, as 
the Jews had long expected to come in that way, Jesus 
said, Math, xi., 14-15: 'If ye are willing to receive it, 
this (John the Baptist) is Elias which was for to 
come. He that hath ears to hear, let him hear." 

Again in Math, xvii., 12: ''But I say unto you that 
Elias has come already, and they knew him not, but 
have done unto him whatsoever they listed. Likewise 
shall also the Son of Man suffer of them."* 

Then the disciples knew that he spake to them of 
John the Baptist. Again in John, ist chapter, verses 
6-10: ''There was a man sent from God, whose name 
was John. The same came for a witness to bear wit- 
ness of the Light that all men through him might 
believe. He was not that Light, but was sent to bear 
witness of that Light. That was the true light that 
lighteth every man that cometh into the world." 

In John X., 36, and elsewhere, Jesus applies similar 
language to himself: "Say ye of him whom the Father 
hath sanctified and sent into the world, thou blasphem- 
est because I said I am a son of God ?" 

(This passage in John has always been wrongly 
translated. Not the Son of God, but a son is the prop- 
er translation ; but a son — one of the Sons of God — is 



* This Elias, or "John the Baptist/' appears also with Moses 
after his assassination by Herod, and converses with Jesus 
at the transfiguration, so that at the time of the transfigura- 
tion of Jesus, Elias could have been but a little time in spirit 
life after his murder by Herod. 

59 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

the true rendering of this text.) The translators have 
always strained this passage, as they have some others, 
to make it appear that he laid claim to being the Infinite 
God himself, instead of being "made like mito His 
brethren/' one of the Sons of the God, as the Scriptures 
declare. 

Did he not teach all to pray: "Our Father who art 
in the heavens" ? As much ''our Father'' as he claimed 
Himself to be. And the view should not lower Him in 
any view or degree whatsoever, but it does elevate man 
and doth show forth the glory and grandeur of the 
destiny that awaits him in the future. "For he took 
not on him the nature (even) of angels: but he took 
on him the seed of Abraham.'' 

Yes, pre-existence and reincarnation, its companion 
doctrine, form the keynote of John's gospel, and if we 
take them in connection with the metaphysiology of the 
Divine Man which runs all through its wonderful pages, 
but more especially to be found in that last address and 
prayer of the Master, to be found in the vi., x., xiv., xv., 
xvi. and xvii. chapters of John, it makes his gospel 
the most interesting and authoritative exposition in 
symbolic language of the metaphysiology of the divine, 
spiritual God-man to be found in the whole v/orld. 

As containing the true metaphysiology of the Divine 
Man there is nothing to be found elsewhere in all the 
writings of the sages of the past that can be com- 
pared with it — not even in the works of the great 
Greek philosopher, Plato-Socrates. But some one wnll 
say this doctrine of pre-existence, so far as the Scrip- 
tures are concerned, applies to one, and only one — to 
Christ Himself, the very God. On the contrary, as 
we have already seen, not only is the prophet John 
spoken of in this relation as one Vv'ho, like Christ, was 
'*sent from God," but so, likewise, is the prophet 
Jeremiah. We refer the reader to Jer. i., 5 : "Before 
I formed thee in the belly I knew thee: and before 
thou earnest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee 
and ordained thee a prophet unto the nations." 

That Jesus never intended to assume any super- 

60 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

human character or powers is all too plain from the 
entire spirit of His teachings. 

When Jesus, after His resurrection, meets Mary at 
the sepulchre, he saith to her: ''Touch me not. But 
go to my brethren and say to them, ascend to my 
Father and your Father and to my God and your 
God.'' And it is equally plain that His disciples re- 
garded Him in the same light, as a man "sent from 
God'' — a minister and teacher plenipotentiary sent from 
the great Fatherhood of the vast, infinite societies of 
the spiritual world and bearing with him and from 
them the elements of a new dispensation, whose evo- 
lution involved the spiritual welfare of the whole 
human race. "Wherefore in all things it behoved 
him to be made like unto his brethren,'' saith the 
Apostle Paul. 

The assumption that Jesus is the Supreme Being 
in its totality — He who inhabits the whole material 
universe of God — is not only contrary to all reason 
and sound sense, but is wholly unthinkable. But, as 
Mr. Webster once said: 'There are those who can 
reason against the sun !" 

^'Before Abraham was I am'' ! No grander expres- 
sion ever fell from the lips of man. But what Jesus 
intended to say by this beautiful expression was that 
He was a more advanced spirit in the organic societies 
of the spiritual heavens — ranked higher in the knowl- 
edge of spiritual things than Abraham. 

So also John, who ranked himself below Jesus in 
the spiritual heavens, as Vv^ell as in the world. "This 
is He of whom I spake. He that cometh after me is 
preferred before me, for he was (in spirit life) 
before me, whose shoe's latchet I am not worthy to 
unloose." 

Jesus was one of the ancient Fatherhood, and had 
more extended experience in universal life; had 
passed through a greater number of incarna- 
tions in the present order of the world's material 
and spiritual estates. Hence he was the one 
chosen as a more advanced member of the 
Fatherhood, and the one best prepared to lead the 

6i 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

very important movement originating in the spiritual 
heavens and with the Vatera, or Fathers of the race, 
to estabHsh a more perfect religion and the primal 
truths of a higher philosophy and a more scientific 
spiritual system than any of the great Avaters that 
had preceded him. 

Among the passages in John to which we desire to 
call the attention of the reader are several that refer 
to the physiology of the divine spiritual man. For 
in truth and verity ''there is a natural (material) 
body and there is a spiritual body/' as saith Paul. 
And as there is a physiology of the natural body, or 
soma, so in like manner is there also a metaphysiology 
of the metaphysical body, or psyche, or spiriHial body. 

The first to which we refer the reader is in John 
vi., 51-53: 'T am the living bread which came down 
from Heaven: if any man eat of this bread he shall 
live forever, and the bread that I shall give him is 
my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.'' 
The Jews said among themselves: ''How can this 
man give us his flesh to eat?" Jesus in reply said to 
them: "Verily, verily I say unto you, except ye eat 
the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, 
ye have no life in you." 

We come now to a very remarkable passage that is 
found in Rev. xxii., 16, and is the very last word 
He has ever been known to give utterance to since 
His return to spirit life at the time of His resurrec- 
tion: "I, Jesus, have sent mine angel to testify these 
things in the churches : I am the root and the offspring 
of David and the bright and morning star." 

Jesus here, in the fuller light and more perfect 
revealment in spirit life as to his rank and office in 
the great forces of civilization, undertakes to define 
Himself more perfectly, and to put aside the errors, 
many of them, into which so great a number of his 
followers have since fallen, both in apostolic and more 
modern times. 

When Jesus refers to Himself as being the offspring 
of David, the whole world knows what He means, 
both church people and unbelievers. Though twenty- 

62 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

eight generations of men had come in after the time 
of that Jewish king, and before Jesus' time, He was 
still reckoned as the ''offspring'' of David, and was 
such in the true spiritual sense in which it was in- 
tended to apply. If now we will only allow the same 
rules of exegesis to apply to His other declaration, 
that He was also the ''root'' of David, we shall not 
only see that He intends, by so saying, to assert that 
He had also incarnated at one time, and that, too, in 
past time, in the same family of that Jewish monarch, 
and hence constituted himself as the ''root'' of David. 
For the w^ord root as applied to human beings, signi- 
fies ''ancestor/' or "progenitor," as defined by Web- 
ster, and these two meanings are the only ones he 
gives. 

In this manner the beloved Christ refers to two of 
His own terrestriations, or incarnations, in material 
life forms, not intending, however, that it should re- 
main as anything else than as one of the arcana of the 
Word, until mankind at large shall have arrived at a 
larger and more perfect spiritual understanding, when 
not only this, but many other occult forms of the Di- 
vine Word, will be made clear to the perceptions of 
mankind. 

The church authorities of the spiritual world are in 
some respects holding back the various churches of 
the world in the perception and understanding of spir- 
itual things, and are holding them in the liberal and 
symbolical sense, and for the benefit of the lower races 
and classes of mankind. 

It is not intended by the spiritual leaders of the 
church in spirit life that mankind shall fully and prac- 
tically embrace this and many other doctrines of the 
Word until they have advanced to a deeper and more 
spiritual perception of the Divine Word, not only as 
it exists in our own scriptures, but as it has also been 
given in all other religions and Bibles in all the world 
and in all ages. Jesus recognizes this important truth 
when He says: "Other men have labored and ye — 
His disciples-^have entered into their labors." 

Until mankind at large has in this manner become 

63 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

more spiritually advanced concerning the great laws of 
metaphysiology, it would be somewhat of an injury to 
them to be brought too closely in contact with some 
of the religions of the world. Hence the spiritual 
restraint in which the churches of to-day are still 
held. 

For in all truth and reason the infant spiritual man 
cannot properly comprehend, and spiritually digest, the 
spiritual foods of the more adult spiritual man, but 
must be fed for long ages on the milk of the spiritual 
foods, and cannot take much or many forms of the 
spiritual meats and breads that are ''spiritually dis- 
cerned'' and eaten by the older and more advanced 
spiritual men and women. 

Such must subsist upon the milk of the Word, and 
other simpler forms of spiritual foods. It is for such 
reasons that the spiritual heads of the church in the 
spiritual heavens have retained the church militant in 
the world for so long a period of time, living upon 
the diluted forms of spiritual nutrition, such as are 
found in the symbolic and other literal forms of the 
mere husks of the Word. 

The interpretation of the sense in which Jesus in- 
tended the word root should be received by the 
churches in all due time is confirmed in a manner in 
Rev. xix., 12. Speaking of the man Jesus, John says: 
''His eyes were as a flame of fire, and on his head were 
many crowns. And he had a name written that no 
man knew but he himself.'' 

This passage in Revelation, were it taken literally, 
would involve the greatest absurdity. But when it is 
properly understood spiritually, contains a beautiful 
arcannm. The "many crowns" spoken of in this re- 
markable passage refer to the many crowned exis- 
tences, or re-incarnations, which He had experienced 
in the past. 

That this is what it is intended to represent we shall 
refer the reader to Rev. ii., lo: 

"Fear none of those things which thou shalt suffer : 
behold the devil shall cast some of you into prison 
that ye may be tried: and ye shall have tribulation 

64 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

ten days; but be thou faithful unto death and I will 
give thee a crown of life V 

Again in Rev. iii., ii : "Behold I come quickly: hold 
fast that which thoii hasty that no man take thy 
crown.'' 

The victors in the gladiatorial sports of the ancient 
Romans were crowned with laurels, and those who 
triumphed in the Olympian games of the Greeks in 
like manner were similarly crowned. So in the spir- 
itual world a similar award is given to the man who, 
at the end of a well-spent life, has triumphed over all 
his foes. He is entitled to and receives a crown at 
the end of each of his terrestrial reincarnations. 

But these views concerning the pre-existences and 
the reincarnations of the Divine Man are quite as strik- 
ingly referred to in Micah v., 2, which reads as fol- 
lows: "And thou Bethlehem EphrataK, though thou 
be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee 
shall he come forth unto me, he that is to be a ruler 
in Israel : whose 'goings forth' have been from of 
old — FROM EVERLASTING." How grandly, gloriously 
beautiful the expressions ! 

These expressions, "come forth," "goings forth," 
have a distinct and peculiar sense, and refer to the 
cycles of re-births and re-embodiments that Jesus, like 
all other very advanced men, had experienced in his 
past eternities of being. In John xvi., 28, Jesus uses 
the same expression : "I 'came forth' from the Father- 
hood (or Vatera) and am come into the world. Again 
L leave the world and go to the Fatherhood." 

Man in his terrestrial estates is but a spiritual in- 
fant, a veritable "Son of God," and as such belongs 
to the spiritual childhood of the race. 

In his nearest approach to the animal world, he is 
very little if anything more than the spiritual larva 
of a man. As he advances, however, into the higher 
and more advanced degrees of man by repeated in- 
carnations in terrestrial states, he at length becomes 
sufficiently progressed to enter the lower degrees of 
the vast divine Fatherhood of the race which filleth 
the entire spiritual heavens with their light and glory, 

65 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

as spiritual Suns that create, warm and illuminate the 
spiritual and terrestrial worlds and universes of the 
infinite life of God. That we are not mistaken in at- 
tributing so vast and wonderful power to angelic men, 
let the reader refer to Dan. iv., 17, and also to the en- 
tire Apocalypse, where John is shown the marvellous 
power possessed by these angelic men. 

Again, if we follow out this idea of the Godhood 
and if its infinities of societies and of angelic men, we 
can do no better than to refer the reader to the 82d 
Psalm, 6th verse: '1 (Jehovah) have said, Ye are 
God's and all of you are children of the Most High,'' 

Jesus himself indorses this view to the fullest extent 
when on a certain occasion, the Jewish mob were about 
to stone him for what to them appeared to be the 
sheerest blasphemy. Jesus replies to their charges of 
blasphemy by quoting from this Psalm of David's, 
and giving to it His full sanction, and emphasizing it 
by appealing to their sense of the sanctity of the 
Scriptures in which it was written: ''Is it not written 
in your law, I said ye are God's." Now if He called 
them Gods to whom the Word of God came, viz., the 
common people. Say ye of Him whom the Father 
hath sanctified and sent into the world, thou blas- 
phemest because I said I am a Son of God — not the 
Son of God, which is a false translation. 

Yes, in this mistranslation of the words, ''Son of 
God," which has no article, definite or indefinite, but 
which was prefaced by the definite article the is to be 
found one of the principal errors in the translation 
that go to make Christ to appear to be the Son of God 
in a special and separate sense from the rest of man- 
kind. It adds vastly to the greatness, grandeur and 
glory of the man Jesus, if we accept Him, as did His 
disciples, as an "elder brother," and hence as one 
that had passed through many and great experiences 
in the realms of being, and had come down into our 
little world to instruct its people in their low, ig- 
norant and savage conditions. 



m 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



WHERE AND WHAT IS HEAVEN? 

"Heaven lies all about us in our infancy/' says the 
poet Wordsworth, referring to it in the spiritual sense 
of the word. It is also quite as true in the literal and 
scientific sense. The spiritual heavens of our planet 
surround the earth in a series (seven in number) of 
concentric spheres or zones that extend sixty degrees 
north and south from the equator toward either pole. 

These zones or belts are placed at different distances 
from each other and from the earth, varying from fifty 
miles near the earth to many hundreds of miles each, 
for the higher spheres, as I have been informed by my 
celestial teachers. 

These spheres or zones, as they are termed in spirit 
life, are very much like our own earth for the first and 
second spheres. 

They are not only provided with mountain systems 
very much like those of our own world, but also with 
streams of water, hills, valleys, lakes and seas. 

These lower spheres — the first and second — have 
not in past times been subject to much improvement, 
having been abandoned by the higher classes and given 
up to the lower and very lowest elements of humanity, 
as they have been upon the earth plane itself; and it 
is this abandonment of the lower spheres to the lower 
castes and classes, thus practically converting them 
into the dens, prisons and the slums of spirit life, that 
has given these dire abodes of spirit life their terrible 
reputation during the long past ages, down to quite 
recent times. But within the last three-fourths of a 
century a new order of things has been growing up 
amid those dread abodes of spirit men — originated and 
put in operation by the wise and the good of spirit 
life, who are now earnest and active in the work of 
cleaning up and putting in order all parts of the spirit- 
ual lower worlds and making them fit abodes for hu- 
man kind. Schools, colleges, lyceums, societies of 
various kinds have been established for the instruction 

67 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

of all classes. The Salvation Army, which is one of 
the very greatest of the educative and uplifting forces 
of the life of man, originated in the spirit world, and 
is among the greatest, if not the very greatest, of the 
healing and holy influences that are leading the people 
of the spirit world to a newer and a nobler Hfe. 

General Booth, the man who inaugurated the ''Sal- 
vation Army'' in our world, received, and still receives, 
his inspirations from the good, the great and the wise 
philanthropists of that worlds and is wisely pursuing 
the same means and methods employed by them in the 
work of elevating the ignorant and the fallen ones of 
earth. 

Thousands upon thousands of the intelligent, wise 
and good of spirit life are engaged in this divine and 
holy work. They descend from even the very highest 
spheres of spiritual life by myriads to assist in these 
sublime and glorious labors. Among them are great 
numbers of the former kings, emperors and other 
worldly potentates who in this life oppressed and im- 
poverished their peoples, but are now engaged in the 
far nobler and better work of aiding them in getting 
rid of their ignorances and their poverties and to 
become men and angels in the divine uses they are 
destined to fulfil. In this glorious work of elevating 
the people in the lower spheres the beloved ''Master," 
who is the President of the Philanthropical Society of 
the Spiritual World, bears an active as well as an 
exalted function. Some time after his arrival in spirit 
life he went and "preached to the spirits in prison,'' 
as has been related of him by the Apostle Peter. 
But too dense and dark a cloud of ignorance hung 
over the lower spheres of the life of man, and the work 
of evangelizing those spheres was abandoned for the 
time, and was not resumed until a little more than 
a half century ago — fifty-five years — when the spirit- 
ual heavens were again opened to all who were able 
and willing to receive the new revealments from the 
spiritual world which, for the sake of the protection 
of the Divine Word and the infant spiritual man 
against the misconceptions and ignorances of both 

68 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

worlds, and especially of those coming from the spirit- 
ual world, the spiritual heavens had of necessity been 
closed up until such times as the understandings of 
men and the progress of the sciences should render it 
safe to reopen them again, especially to such as are of 
honest, earnest and candid minds. 

At that time Jesus answered and said: ''I thank 
thee. Oh Father, Lord of heaven and earth, because 
thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, 
and hast revealed them unto babes/' 

The doors of the spiritual world were opened dur- 
ing the time of the Master, and for a brief period af- 
terward, during apostolic times, for the purpose of 
working those miracles which were wrought to aid 
in the establishment of Christianity upon a sure 
foundation, and were shortly afterward closed again 
until advancing science, and man himself, should have 
made a degree of progress that would render such 
vigilant guarding of the ''gates of day" unnecessary 
for all advanced, intelligent minds, while prejudice 
and self-interest would take care of the rest. 

For in deed and truth do ''all things work together 
for good to them that serve God." Yea, all things. 
"From seeming evil, still educing good," in the words 
of beloved Milton. 

I have been informed by my spirit guides that the 
''zodiacal light" which surrounds our sun and ex- 
tends outward hundreds of millions of miles, accord- 
ing to some astronomers, is the true basis of our more 
permanent spiritual heavens. The spiritual heavens 
of our own little planet earth, with its seven concen- 
tric spheres, extends only about 1,500 miles outward 
into surrounding space. On the other hand, the solar 
spiritual-celestial heavens of our sun, when fully com- 
pleted, will occupy many billions of miles in extent in 
its several axes — m.ajor, minor and transverse. 

It is a spheroid, both prolate and oblate in form, 
that surrounds our sun on all sides of him, extending 
to vast distances beyond him, and, like the material 
earth's also, is one of the manifold attendant worlds 

69 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

that surrounds our sun on all sides of him, extending 
through the infinite fields of space. 

For our system of worlds, both the major and 
minor planets and their dependent baby worldlets, 
together with the sun himself, from a universe that 
is still very young; many of its parts are 3^et very in- 
complete; and the spiritual universes also share with 
the more material orbfi themselves in their youth and 
their incompleteness. 

But I hear some objector say: ''Why is it that, if the 
spirit worlds, as you say. He all around about us on 
every side, that we cannot see them ?" In reply we will 
say that it is owing to the fact that flesh, and spirit — 
matter and spirit, which amounts to the same things — 
are spiritual incompatibles, so that the one can not 
see or ''discern'' the other — neither the Hesh the spirit 
nor the spirit the flesh, save in a very limited degree 
and way. 

For there are spiritual incompatibles r.nd chemical 
incompatibles, and the inability of the flesh to see or 
''discern'* spiritual things, and the inability of the 
spirit to see and fully comprehend material things, has 
always been a very great mystery and a stumbling 
block to the greatest minds in all ages of the world 
as Paul, one of the greatest of theologians, has given 
ample testimony in his epistle to the Romans in chap- 
ters vii. and viii. 

It is true they have a limited ability to cognize each 
the other, but a quite limited one indeed, especially 
so, in truth, in regard to the ability or more strictly 
speaking, the inability of matter to discern the things 
of the spirit. 

Has not the materialistic philosopher been blindly 
and busily at work delving in the mud of earth and 
skies, looking for the source of all spiritual things 
without the ability to find them? As a chemist at an 
early day he informed the world that the oils of pep- 
per and of turpentine were the same things, although 
poor, unscientific mortals were unable to see it, or 
rather to feel it in that light. 

Poor pseudo science also made the same mistake 

70 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

concerning the identity of the white diamonds with 
which the fair lady adorns her person, and the black 
diamonds with which she warms herself at the parlor 
stove. "They are the same V says chemistry. Pseudo 
science endeavors to explain by saying that this mar- 
vellous difference in the physical properties of the 
twain substances is due to the fact that the minute 
globules of carbon, etc., are differently arranged in 
the two substances, and hence the wonderful differ- 
ence in results. But the philosophic mind whose eye- 
sight has not been blurred by too much and long delv- 
ing in nebular and other forms of matter to find the 
rootlets of the tree of knowledge will naturally in- 
quire : ''But how came it about that these hypothetical 
globules of matter have been so differently placed and 
arranged in the one substance than in the other, and 
what was the placing force that could arrange them so 
differently as to create such marvellous differences in 
the results?^ 

We look in vain in all the scientific works for an 
explanation of this wonderful phenomenon in the oc- 
cult relations of mind and matter, a fact easy enough 
to ''discern,'' if we can only lay aside our preconceived 
notions and examine the subject in the light of pure 
reason ! 

This mysterious force that handles the delicate 
globules of carbon so deftly, and with so wonderful 
and scientific exactness — what is it in truth, if not the 
sold itself that science hath been looking for these 
past thousands of years, and looking in vain, for the 
very true yet simple reason that it is not physically 
'discerned,'' but spiritually. For all things that are 

* Wherever there is a deed — something done — there of ne- 
cessity is a doer. Wherever there is an effect there is also 
a cause that produced it. Just as sure as night follows day, or 
the body which released from the hand falls to the earth. 

And what are these occult forces that thus differentiate the 
two bodies of carbon in this wonderful way: what are they 
but two very different spirit souls that in some mysterious 
way have been for a time lodged in bodies of carbon, and 
in doing so were compelled to temper and conform them to 
their own forms and modes of living or modus vivendi, 

71 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

hath both a soul and a body and the twain both see and 
understand, and yet eternally misunderstand^ each 
other, since one of them, being but a product of the 
other, fits it so exactly as its material counterpart that 
unless the cognizant mind can discern the distinguish- 
ing marks that diagnose the twain, he will confound 
this mechanical coincidence of the twain as absolute 
proof of an exact coincidence of being. Hence a 
denial of the existence of soul. And hence this denial 
of the existence of a spiritual organic interior force, 
that, under the guidance of the higher creative ener- 
gies of life universal, organizes and upbuilds all ma- 
terial things out of the raw material forces of chaotic 
life. This is where the materialist lost his way, and 
with his dim lantern, has been floundering around ever 
since in the mud and mire of the external world, tak- 
ing another look to discover his lost path. But he will 
do vastly better bye and bye. He will go to the higher 
hills of life for a new standpoint and point of de- 
parture, and begin his search over again in pursuit 
of his lost path, and will extend his investigations, 
many of them, to fields that he never dreamed of 
before. 



WHAT ARE THE HELLS? 

IN VERY GENERAL TERMS. 

They are the lower workshops of the race, where, 
growing out of his early incarnations in terrestrial 
estates and upon the human plane, he encounters vasi 
evils, antagonisms, inharmonies, hardships, untold 
deeps of sorrows, pains, anguishes that often crush 
the very heart of man ; he is set to work by the higher 
powers as a slave to man and even to nature herself in 
labors manifold and severe, to educate his mind, brain, 
nerve, muscle, bone, sinew and to give him the will as 
well as the ability to labor ; and to put the steel and the 
granite into the deep foundations of his being, and to 

72 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

give him that energy and hardihood that are indispen- 
sable to his requirements by enabHng him to bridge 
over the eternities of existence that lie before him. 

The creative intelligences of spirit life had dandled 
him upon the lap of nature ; the whoie habitable world 
within the tropics had indeed been a veritable "Garden 
of Eden/' where his spiritual guides and teachers had 
provided ''every tree that is pleasant to the sight and 
good for food/' The tree of life also was in the midst 
of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and 
evil. He had nothing farther to do in order to live 
in abundance than to put forth his hand and pluck 
the fruits that nature had provided for him, and every 
animal want was fully satisfied. 

It was during the pliocene period of Tertiary times 
that man made his advent upon the planet, and there 
was an almost tropical climate over the entire planet 
nearly to the poles, and tropical fruits grew in abun- 
dance for the use of animal man over the entire area 
of this vast garden. 

But man, though he came forth from the animal 
world, which was the scaffolding by which the crea- 
tive wisdoms had built him up, and his whole nature 
was animal-like in character, was something more than 
a progressed ape. 

God, the supreme architect of the worlds, though 
making use of the ''dust of the earth" — protoplasm — 
as his building material, yet ere he completed his di- 
vine labors in creating man, he "breathed into his nos- 
trils the breath of life'' — the divine pneuma. "^^And 
man became a living sour — a vastly greater and more 
advanced being than any of the animal forms below 
him and out of which he sprang. 

But there came a time when man could no longer be 
permitted to live upon the labors of others, eating the 
fruits of the labors of the gods and lying around in 
the shade when satisfied with abundance, like any 
other mere animal, without spiritual intelligence, with- 
out thought, without reflection and without the ability 
to discriminate between good and evil — a little, 
though not much, above the mental and moral status 

73 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

of the higher orders of the anthropoid apes. The child 
has to be weaned from this state of being dandled for- 
ever on the lap of mother nature, and set to work to 
earn his own living by his own labor, and very hard 
labor it has proved to be. 

The serpent, that most ''subtle," crafty and insinu- 
ating principle in the interior of the life of man, is 
prompted to tempt him to ''eat of the fruit of the tree 
of knowledge of good and evil,' that, like the tree of 
life, grew in the garden of man's being. But this is 
the very thing desired and sought for by the higher 
powers of the spiritual world, and it is really due to 
their promptings that this ''subtle," serpentine element 
in man's nature is set in motion and becomes active 
with the desire to become "as gods, knowing good 
and evil." , 

This threatening command on the part of the Lord 
God is addressed to the man as an animal being 
merely — one who has not reached the spiritual status 
to discern "between good and evil." "Of every tree 
of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree 
of knowledge of good and evil thou shalt not eat of 
it: for in the day thou eatest of it thou shalt surely 
die/' Now, as a historic being, this man Adam does 
not die at all, either on the day when he ate the apple, 
or on any other day of the 930 years of his natural life. 

And yet the prophecy of the Lord was literally ful- 
filled, the spiritual eyes of the man were opened, and 
he at once began to see spiritual things, and his mere 
animal nature began to "fall" from him, and as it 
falls the spiritual man within him riseSy and will con- 
tinue to rise until the whole man has been transformed 
from the nature of an animal to that of the God, and 
he has been transferred from the low plane of animal 
desires, affections and knowledges to the high spiritual 
planes, loves, wisdoms and intelligences of the Gods 
of the race. 

Yes, all these gigantic evils of every sort and kind 
which man has experienced is due to the fact that he 
is encamped on the great battlefield, and is engaged in 
the mighty conflict that is forever taking place be- 

74 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

tween truth and error, light and darkness, the animal 
and the spiritual within him and without him, until he 
has fought his way. 

Upward from the material and terrestrial planes 
of existence and on to the high social, spiritual and 
celestial planes of his being. Yes, all the mighty evils 
of any form and kind that man has experienced in 
the long ages of the past have been absolutely indis- 
pensable to his growth, progress and welfare as a 
spiritual being. It required an educatory period of 
more than 200 years and in a state of slavery to edu- 
cate the colored men of this country mentally and 
physically up to a grade where he is capable of taking 
care of himself as a physical being and to impart to 
him some of the ideas and principles of self-govern- 
ment. And yet this cannot be said of all of them, 
a large per cent, of whom have not reached that 
standard in performing the divine uses of labor and 
in the matter of a just and righteous self-government; 
but few of them, comparatively speaking, have as yet 
manifested the ability to do it. Yes, upon the political 
and civil planes of being, the colored man, not of this 
country alone, but of nearly all other countries, is on 
a still lower plane of evolvement, so that his white 
brother is obliged to serve as a prop to prevent him 
from falling into anarchy, as they have done in Haiti 
and other Southern countries, where revolution suc- 
ceeds revolution with greater frequency than the ad- 
vent of the years, after more than a century of self- 
government, or self-anarchy, rather, that is found no- 
where else in all the world. 

These are some of the divine uses of labor and of 
the so-called hells of both the spiritual and the terres- 
trial sides of this our life in the flesh. Terrible as are 
some of the so-called hells of spirit life, the purposes 
they are intended to subserve in the economies of uni- 
versal life are analogous to those performed by the 
jails, penitentiaries and prisons of earth life, though 
at the present time less primitive and more reforma- 
tive in character. 

In the time of Jesus the condition of the ignorant 

75 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and the criminal classes in the lower spheres of spirit 
life was indeed very bad. As Jesus could give man- 
kind no definite idea of the character of the sufferings 
of human beings in spirit life, lie was obliged to make 
use of highly wrought symbols to express his sense 
of the nature of man's sorrows and sufferings in spirit 
life, and his views so expressed have been greatly 
exaggerated and misrepresented by the dense spiritual 
ignorance of mankind and by many mistranslations of 
the Word itself. But mankind, the more spiritual- 
advanced classes, have progressed beyond their spirit- 
ual-larval estates, and the large influx of these ad- 
vanced classes into spirit life during several centuries 
past is fast producing a new order of things in spirit 
life, and vastly to the enlightenment, progress and 
welfare of all classes, and especially of the lower 
classes. 

Yes, the infant spiritual man of this time is shaped 
and shaping himself beneath the hammer of the 
celestial intelligences — is fitting himself to enter into 
more perfect and harmonial relations with the higher 
Gods of the race and with his fellows. It is the advent 
of the spiritual millennium so long prophesied of, and 
which is destined to bring in the "new heavens and the 
new earth." 

Swedenborg's greatest mistake, however, concern- 
ing the hells of spirit life, very naturally and in great 
measure grew out of his aristocratic relations and 
sympathies, his lack of sympathy with the lower 
classes, and more especially the sinful classes of hu- 
manity, and his belief in common with the beliefs of 
the churches, and also of his spirit guides and in- 
structors in the spiritual world; and of mankind at 
large, viz., that the sinner as such is not so as an 
expression in time and in world of forces that were 
put into him before he was born by creative and 
hereditive influences, but that he is such from a known 
and an intentional bad use of his moral, mental and 
spiritual faculties, and from hatred and disregard of 
the laws of God and humanity. 

It was a moral badness that he put into himself, 

76 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

with which his Creator had nothing to do in the way 

of responsibility. 

They forget the statement of Christ: *'A good tree 
cannot bring forth evil fruit ; neither can a corrupt tree 
bring forth good fruit — for a tree is known by its 
fruit/' 

It is with the morally unhealthy as Jesus put it in 
behalf of the man born blind. We must allow the 
Creator to share a great part of the responsibility in 
the case, if not the whole of it, as did Jesus. "Neither 
this man did sin nor his parents, but that the works 
of God might be made manifest in him." Yes, this 
lack of moral and spiritual perception on the part of 
the sinner cometh not from any intentional badness 
that in some mysterious way he has got into himself. 
It is due nearly if not wholly to the exercise of forces 
that were put into him long before he ever saw the 
light of day; and to the fact that he has never ex- 
perienced the refining and potentizing influences of 
a sufficient number of incarnations in terrestrial and 
spiritual spheres of life to lift him up onto the higher 
planes of spiritual life. Take the worst murderer 
that world or universe has produced and give him a 
few more reincarnations in terrestrial and spiritual 
life forms, and you will find him somewhere in one of 
the higher ranks of mankind. Said a little lady theos- 
ophist to one who had manifested very bad manners 
in her presence: "You will do better when you are 
grown!" Yes, man is a spiritual being that revolves 
in the eternities and infinities of universal life, and 
requires vast periods of time to bring him up to the 
stature of the God. Let us therefore be patient and 
give him all the time he may require to reach the 
period of perfect self-government, and not be too 
much annoyed or distressed at the antics, cruelties 
and other barbarisms of the spiritual infant, for "all 
babies are barbarians," as some one has well said. 

This idea that man advances in spiritual life and 
growth by repeated reincarnations is somewhat eluci- 
dated by both John the Baptist and by Jesus himself. 
To quote from the words of John: "And this is the 

77 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

record of John when the Jews sent priests and Levites 
from Jerusalem to ask him, Who art thou? John 
bare witness of him and cried saying, This is he of 
whom I spake. He that cometh after me is pre- 
ferred before me, for he zvas before me." This second 
use of the word ''before' has a different meaning from 
the one used in the first part of the sentence"^ and has 
a similar use and meaning to one given to it by Jesus 
himself in John viii., 58: ''Before Abraham was I 
am." He does not refer to the number of years he 
had lived in the world during his present incarnation, 
but to the more important fact that he was really an 
older spirit than was Abraham, by virtue of the fact 
that he was an older spirit than Abraham in having 
passed through a greater number of incarnations, two 
of which, as we shall see elsewhere, he has referred 
to in his very last words — Rev. xxii., 16. 

Yes, it is a question of the number of incarnations 
the person has passed through that determines his 
mental and moral status, and not one of intentional 
vileness or badness that make some people good and 
others bad. They have not yet fully cast out — and 
off — the animal man which they brought up with 
them out of the animal world from which they origin- 
ally came, and whose knowledges, though manifold 
and keen, do not include among them the higher wis- 
doms and knowledges of ''good and evil/' The earlier 
forms of man upon the planet did not possess the 
ability to discriminate between good and evil, which 
is true in great measure of some of the lowst forms of 
mankind that exist upon the planet at the present 
time 

The creative intelligence in drawing the line of the 
comparative mental powers of man and the animal 
world below him, drew it at the line of demarcation 
between "good and evil'' on the one hand, and all 
other inferior forms of intelligence on the other. And 
yet there are some animals that appear in many cases 



* The one refers to time and the other to spiritual con- 
ditions. 

78 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

to manifest faint perceptions of good and evil and of 
a rational intelligence. 

This earliest form of mankind, who lived in the 
Tertiary era, when the climate of the earth was tropi- 
cal nearly to the poles, and as a consequence the whole 
world nearly was a veritable ''garden,'' is the ''Adam" 
or earth-man of Genesis, and typifies the animal na- 
ture that is in man. The entire story of the origin of 
man as given in Genesis is a beautiful mythy and we 
can make nothing rational out of it, unless we carry 
the wonderful symbolism all the way through. . 

Another of the leading and very mwleading mis- 
takes of Swedenborg is found in paragraph N. 480 
of his work on Heaven and HelU in which he gives 
the reason why man is unable to escape from the hells 
of spirit life by progression into the higher spheres of 
the spiritual life of man. 

We quote: 'That man after death remains to 
eternity such as he is as to his will or reigning love, 
has also been confirmed by abundant expe- 
rience. . . . 

"It was said by the angels that the life of the 
reigning love is never changed with any one to 
eternity, since every one is his own love. To change 
that love in a spirit, therefore, would be to deprive 
him of his life. They also told me the reason, namely, 
that man after death can no longer be reformed by in- 
struction as in the world, because the ultimate plane 
(or material body), which consists of natural knowl- 
edges and affections, is then quiescent and cannot be 
opened, because it is spiritual, and that upon that 
plane the interiors, which are of the mind, rest as a 
house upon its foundation; and hence it is that man 
remains to eternity such as the life of his love had 
been in the world." 

Such are some of the chief reasons by which 
Swedenborg seeks to demonstrate the eternality of 
the so-called hells of man in spirit life whereby God 
and his mercy, love, compassion, tenderness, his senti- 
ments of reason and justice, are forever barred out, 
and the Creator himself, the universal Father — ^He 

79 



'MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

whose compassion is called forth even by the fall of 
a sparrow — becomes the victim of an iron fatalism 
from which there is no escape for him to all eternity! 

That Swedenborg, great as he undoubtedly was, 
was in some way greatly misled by his spirit teachers, 
chief among whom was St. Augustine, who in this 
life was a fatalist in his church views, of the most 
pronounced character, and exerted a more powerful 
influence in shaping the creeds of Christendom than 
all the other church fathers together, there can be 
little reasonable doubt. Such a doctrine shocks every 
sentiment of justice, reason and fair play that exists 
in the heart of man. It is a terrible libel upon the 
character of the Creator — an awful travesty on the 
character of our Heavenly Father. It would render 
migratory — nay, worse than useless, the mission of 
the Master into Hades after his return to spirit life 
to ^'preach to the spirits in prison,'' as stated by Peter, 
I. Pet. iii., 19, 20. The attempt to preach repentance 
and reform to men and women whom the eternal 
laws of God had forever precluded from all hope, all 
chance of change in the betterment of their spiritual 
conditions, would, in our estimation, be about the 
worst case of tantalism that ever struck time since the 
days of Tantalus himselt 

Swedenborg also, like the poet Dante, wrote upon 
the doors of the hells of spirit life: ^'Leave hope be- 
hind, all ye who enter hereV His ideas, if true, 
would colonize the greater portion of God's great 
family of children in eternal fire ! 

Can such an awful state of things be true, and 
would it not involve all the other man-breeding worlds 
in a like calamity, unless the Creator has given them all 
better terms and conditions for the evolution of their 
peoples than He hath given to our own dear little 
world? But this would hardly be just and fair. We 
cannot believe it. 

But let us examine this matter of these mistakes of 
the seer Swedenborg from still another viewpoint. 

It is a rather curious circumstance in the life of 
John Wesley that he received at one time a satin note 

80 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

from Swedenborg not long before his death/ in which 
he invited him to an interview with himself, naming 
the hour and place (at his hotel in London) for the 
meeting, and informing him that the angels of the 
Sixth Circle had informed him that Wesley had long 
desired to have such an interview, and had requested 
him (Swedenborg) to grant Wesley the opportunity 
to realize his wish. Wesley at the time was in a con- 
ference of his preachers when he received the 
note, which he at once read to the conference, and 
admitted that Swedenborg's statement was true, and 
that he had long felt a desire to have such an inter- 
view with the great seer, but had never mentioned the 
matter to anyone before. He at once sent a note to 
Swedenborg in reply, informing him that he was about 
to visit a distant conference and could not meet him 
then, but would meet him upon his return. Sweden- 
borg at once replied with a second note to Wesley 
stating that before the time named for his return from 
the conference he himself would have passed to spirit 
life, which in the sequel proved to be true. 

In this way the great apostle of the masses who 
live spiritually upon the literal and exoteric sense of 
the word, and Swedenborg the great apostle of its 
interior, spiritual and esoteric sense, were never — for 
some reason — permitted to meet each other and hold 
the interview that both greatly desired. 

Shall we raise the question, why? To one who be- 
lieves in a Providence that oversees and overrules all 
the affairs of men, and especially in all great and im- 
portant events, there can be no doubt that this meet- 
ing of the two great leaders in the religious life of 
man was disallowed and forbidden in the congresses 
and conventions of the great spiritual hierarchies of 
the spiritual world that hold their sessions in the 
higher spheres of spirit life and preside over the des- 
tinies of the various churches, and determine upon the 
character of the various forces that shall enter into 
them. The formation of new sects to meet the spirit- 
ual needs of a progressive humanity, and the time 
when they shall take their place on the stage of time — 

8i 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

these and many other matters that concern the welfare 
of all the churches — are deliberated over and deter- 
mined upon by these great ecclesiastical bodies in 
spirit life. Otherwise the spiritual and even the ma- 
terial concerns of the churches, both in the spirit world 
and in this world also, would become a chaos and a 
confusion and not an orderly and progressive evolu- 
tion. 

It was probably owing to this fact that these two 
very great men were never permitted to meet in this 
life. There can be but little doubt that the mind of 
Mr. Wesley was already a good deal predisposed to 
look into the affairs of the spirit world for a solution 
of the mystery of the spirit rappings that had taken 
place in the family of his father, Mr. Samuel Wesley, 
and an intimate acquaintance and free intercourse be- 
tween the two great minds would in the end possibly 
have resulted in the adoption by Mr. Wesley of some 
form of spiritualism, so that secession and division 
would have taken place in his church, and two or more 
wrangling, warring sects would have come upon the 
stage, instead of the one great, true organism that has 
done so much to educate and instruct its own people 
and to carry light, truth and salvation to nearly every 
nation and people under the whole heavens. 

That this was the view of the higher intelligences, 
and that the meeting of the two great men was over- 
ruled by them, is not unlikely to say the least. For 
take it all in all we are of the belief that the churches 
as a rule will not be advanced very far into the spirit- 
ual sense of the Word by the angelic wisdoms of the 
spiritual world until the physical and the psychical 
sciences have made greater advancement — -have in 
deed and truth met and kissed each other after their 
long estrangement and separation. 

That that time is close at hand the wonderful strides 
that the physical and the metaphysiological sciences 
have made in recent years betoken the near approach 
of the new era. The trouble with Swedenborg's 
views concerning the limitations of the sphere of ef- 
ficient changes in the life of the spirit man in spirit 

82 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

life, grew out of the fact that when he became a seer 
of spiritual things he came under the instruction of 
spirit teachers who in this life had never enjoyed the 
advantages which the new and marvelous light of 
material science is beginning to cast upon nearly 
every question of a psychical character. 

Indeed, it is in wonderful measure illuminating, in- 
structing and uplifting the minds and the hearts of 
men on all the living questions of the time in more 
than a thousand ways. 

We are swiftly nearing the time spoken of by John 
in Rev. xviii., I, 24, wherein he describes the old order 
of civilization and the manner of its ending, especially 
in the 21st verse of that chapter — an absolutely neces- 
sary and indispensable measure, preparatory to the in- 
troduction of the new order of civilization — the '*new 
heavens and the new earth." The new house can 
never be built on the site of the old one, until the old 
one has been utterly destroyed and taken away. It 
was the lack of this spiritual scientific light, even as 
late as the times of Swedenborg and which his prin- 
cipal teacher in spirit life — St. Augustine — had less 
of in his day than did his pupil — Swedenborg — that 
so greatly unfitted the great seer in so many ways to 
become a true and living interpreter of the ''spiritual 
sense of the word'' as he claimed to be. Hence it is 
that many of his expositions of the Word are not only 
false but absurdly so. 

But again let us inquire "What are the hells of 
spirit life?'' They are surely not places of torment 
where the great Creative Father has colonized his 
great family of children in everlasting flames ! 

Of what conceivable or even inconceivable use could 
such a place or places be to either themselves, to the 
rest of mankind or to the Creator Himself ? 

To subject a being who has been created of so low 
mental and moral status, as we have shown the infant 
spiritual man to be, to eternal torture — who in his 
dense ignorance knows and can know almost nothing 
of the innate and interior laws that govern himself 
and his fellow men — would present the Creator as 

83 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

a Being so wholly unwise, unjust and cruel as to be 
incomprehensible to the reason and understanding 
of mankind instead of the loving Father of all his 
great family of children whom Jesus describes in the 
Sermon on the Mount. And here let us inquire why it 
was that Jesus in some of his rapt moments on several 
occasions denounced the future of the sinner in some- 
what wrathful terms. He was addressing men who 
were infants in their knowledge of the operations of 
the spiritual laws of man's life in either world and 
more especially in the other world ; and as he was well 
aware, both from knowledge and experience, that it 
was useless to attempt to make them comprehend the 
real situation of the man when he has become a citi- 
zen of the spirit world, he did the only thing that 
could be done to impress the minds of his hearers with 
the nature of the dangers and the liabilities he will 
be obliged to encounter when he arrives in spirit life, 
he wrapped the whole subject up in symbols and meta- 
phor and gave it to the people in that form. Like the 
good, wise, earthly parent, whose wayward infant 
child does not fully understand the terrible dangers of 
playing with the fire, he does not sit down and 
preach to him a long discourse on the dangers of fire, 
most of which he will not be able to comprehend, but 
he will be perchance obliged to address the child with 
some degree of asperity and sharpness, ''Keep away 
from the HreT and even punish him in other ways, 
too, if he still refuses to obey his first command. For 
all laws must be indorsed with proper penalties or 
they are not laws in any right sense of the term, and 
hence in the Word most of the laws are spoken of 
as '^Commandments/' ''He spake as one having au- 
thority and not as the scribes." He was addressing 
spiritual infants and he addressed them in language 
that they could comprehend. Any other would have 
been an idle waste of words. And that is without any 
doubt the reason why those who at that time were in- 
strumental in formulating the credos of the churches 
were allowed, possibly prompted, by the higher powers 
to still farther exaggerate if possible, the terrors of 

84 



MAN'S 'PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

the great and awful mystery of the condition of the 
lower and baser classes of mankind in the lowest 
estates of spirit life. 

But a new and glorious era has dawned upon affairs 
in the lowly spheres of spirit life within the past half 
century. As heretofore stated, this is the time referred 
to in Acts 3-21 — the ''times of the restitution of all 
things" in which the lower spheres of the spiritual 
world have become a vast field for the exercise of the 
benevolent energies of the human soul, and myriads 
of the more advanced classes of the spiritual world 
are daily descending into its lower spheres ; yea, many 
of them penetrating into the deepest dens and prisons 
of spirit life, bearing with them light, life, love, hope, 
joy, hope and good cheer to the ''lost" and abandoned 
ones of those terrible places, vast numbers of whom 
have been outcasts from the loves, affections and the 
sympathies of human kind for long ages! "Verily, 
verily I say unto you, that the time cometh and now is 
when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of Man, 
and they that hear shall live." 

But this is more perfectly true of the ability to 
reach the "dead" of both this life and spirit life, also 
in this the second or spiritual coming of Christ, as His 
descent into the hades of spirit life proved a failure to 
accomplish anything for the spiritually dead of gospel 
times, but only for those of more ancient times. 

The spiritually "dead" of gospel times have been 
obliged to remain in the lower spheres for these nearly 
2,000 years — first, because they are utterly repugnant 
to and unfit for society in the higher spheres; second, 
it is best for them to remain right in those spheres 
where they entered spirit life as the very hells them- 
selves, to which they gravitated on their entrance into 
spirit life; are the best society and contain the best 
educating influences the spiritual world could give 
them at that time. The higher, more advanced classes 
of spirit life repelled them too much to do any- 
thing to help these animal men in the lower spheres. 
They were too spiritually aristocratic to be of any use 
to them. An intense mutual dislike and hatred existed 

85 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

between the two classes — the one to give and the other 
to receive instruction or sympathy or help of any sort 
or kind. 

A careful reading of Swedenborg's Heaven and 
Hell reveals in graphic and awful colors the terrible 
antagonisms and intense hatreds that have existed 
between them, due in great measure to this proud and 
aristocratic feeling exercised toward the humbler 
classes by the rich and great of both worlds, so much 
so that it is very much as Seer Swedenborg has stated 
in Heaven and Hell, N. 581 : 'The reason that tor- 
ments in the hells are permitted by the Lord is because 
evils cannot otherwise be restrained and subdued. 

''The only means of restraining and subduing them, 
thus of keeping the infernal crew in bonds, is the fear 
of punishment. There is no other means given; for 
without the fear of punishment and torment, evil 
would burst forth into madness as a kingdom on earth 
where there is no law and no punishment !'' 

Such are some of the expressed sentiments of 
Swedenborg, the great intellect and seer, who shared 
deeply in the aristocratic sentiments of the upper 
classes of his time — sentiments that naturally and 
rightfully grow out of the characteristic differences 
that the Creator hath established among men, and 
which are the glory of the divine humanity when prop- 
erly exercised and understood, as it makes every man 
and woman a living fountain of holy loves, magnet- 
isms, affections, which are foods for the sustenance 
and life of every other soul about him. *'He that be- 
lieveth on me as the Scripture hath said, out of his 
belly shall flow rivers of living water." 

"This is that bread which came down from Heaven. 
He that eateth of this bread shall live forever/' 
"Whoso eateth my flesh {wisdom magnetisms) and 
.drinketh my blood {magnetic loves) hath eternal life." 
*'As the living Father hath sent m.e and I live by the 
Father: so he that eateth me, even he shall live by me." 

It is these divine foods that Christly souls eat of one 
another in their social, spiritual and all other proper 
relations that exist among them, that makes all such 

86 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

intercourse in its higher forms so sustaining, dehght- 
ful and glorious ! 

As the grape yieldeth its life blood for the use 
and sustenance of man as a food for the higher senti- 
ments and passions of mankind; as bread is the *'staff 
of life'' and the chief food of the various bodily or- 
gans especially, so Jesus, at that 'last supper,'' with 
His disciples, symbolized both of them as correspon- 
dential with those social, spiritual and other personal 
foods that Christlike men and women can and do 
constantly impart to each other in all the sweet and 
holy and living relations existing among them. But 
this is not all. Sweet, pure, holy men, soon after their 
entrance into spirit life, enter some one or more of the 
vast societies that exist in the spiritual heavens, and 
there these divine food functions become vastly more 
perfect and potent, each soul not only imparting the 
various divine magnetisms of his being to all others 
in his society, but also receives them ?rom all others. 
Nor is tliUs all. Every society in spirit life is a divine 
unit, and as such exists in the spiritual heavens as an 
integral function for the whole heavens to which it is 
related, and imparts its magnetic and other precious 
divine foods in accord with all its functional relations 
to its own heavens. But the earth itself is but a part 
of spiritual heavens in its lower forms and uses, and 
all its people, as fast as they become sufficiently ad- 
vanced mentally, morally, socially, and have become 
fully harmonized with more or less of its glorious 
societies, are constantly receiving the heavenly mannas 
and all other precious and divine foods that are for- 
ever outflowing from the divine centers of life uni- 
versal, to enrapture, cheer, nourish and sustain all life 
everywhere throughout the living boundaries of all 
created and uncreated beings from monad upward to 
man, and from man to the Gods themselves. 



87 

N '• . I /J 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



THE SPIRITUAL MAN. 

Saith Paul: 'There is a natural body, and there 
is a spiritual body." How Paul came in possession of 
so occult an ontological fact, in an age and country so 
densely ignorant and materialistic, we do not know, 
but imagine it came to him more as a spiritually in- 
spired truth than from any constant rational percep- 
tion of so important a spiritual principle, in all scien- 
tific and logical bearings and results. 

Be that as it may, there is in deed and truth a won- 
derful analogy and correspondence between the two 
organisms. As the mollusk secretes within its more 
interior and delicate organs the material of which its 
external shell or house is formed, and which, with an 
art divinely cunning, it weaves about itself; as the 
tree clothes itself roundabout with the rough covering 
of bark, to protect the more delicate sap vessels of the 
interior ; so, in like manner, doth that divinest artificer, 
the spiritual man, sit back behind the so-called "visi- 
ble" and fabricate that really wonderful house we 
term ''natural body," which, though of apparently 
coarser texture and mold than is the spiritual body, 
it is designed to nourish and protect, is, nevertheless, 
in shape like unto it, and in itself is a marvel of de- 
sign and beauty, when perfected; and is well adapted, 
in all respects, to minister to the needs of the living 
artist that sits within, and weaves it in the loom of 
time. In real truth, this terrestrial house, in which 
man temporarily resides, fulfills the still more im- 
portant function of a laboratory or stomach, in which 
he digests and elaborates the forces of this terrestrial 
plane of being, as the basic elements of the spiritual 
and spiritual-celestial body. 

Matter is only the name of one of these basic forces 
that sustain the universe of being, and the grossness of 
it consists mainly in the grossness of our ideas regard- 
ing it. It externalizes itself, or, more strictly speak- 
ing, the higher forces externalize themselves through 

88 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

matter in three dimensions; but the higher forces 
operate within, in a ''fourth dimension'' (of Prof. 
Zolhier), as the shaft works in the slot, the hand in 
the glove. 

It is by and through this fourth dimension that 
the celestial-spiritual man, after one of his long 
flights through the eternities and infinities of time and 
space, descends ("falls") into terrestrial states and 
forces — even descends into the hells — to rebuild, re- 
new, refresh, reincarnate and more fully eternize his 
spiritual-celestial body. 

As the external body has parts, organs, functions, 
so has the spiritual body — and in the true spiritual- 
celestial man and woman, as distinguished from th<* 
lower or animal man, which is not in itself subject to 
the laws of spiritual good or God, until similiated and 
harmonized with and by the higher or spiritual man, 
it becomes of the highest order both in substance and 
in form, being wrought out from the highest, holiest 
loves, affections, truths, principles of the spiritual 
worlds. 

"The first man is of the earth, earthy," for the 
reason that his body is developed out of the animal 
kingdom below him, and on the terrestrial plane of 
being, and partly out of the mundane forces, by the 
creative intelligences; and it is designed to serve the 
purpose of a ready made house to live in; a ready 
made garment to clothe himself withal; and a ready 
made laboratory to aid him in the easy elaboration 
of those elemental forces with which he is to reclothe, 
rebuild and refurnish his more permanent home, — ^the 
more divine, precious and holy, eternal, spiritual-celes- 
tial man — the Man-God. 

Man as to his foods is an omnivorous being. He is 
not only a plant eater but an eater of animals, in some 
phases of his manifold being. Both the plant and the 
animal have previously passed the elemental forces 
and foods of the material world through the refining 
and reconstructive processes of their own digestive 
organs, thereby raising these elementary forces to a 

89 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

higher organic level before being used by the animal 
man. 

Now, he lives upon the higher spiritual-social and 
spiritual-celestial forms, foods and forces in a some- 
what similar manner. Every soul with whom he is 
brought into touch in the divine harmonies in spiritual- 
social life, is engaged in the labor of eating, digesting, 
elaborating spiritual truths, foods, forces, in the 
laboratory of his own interior, spiritual being, and 
elevating these spiritual foods to still higher food 
levels. Yea, all true spiritual men eat one another — 
impart to each other their spiritual blood (loves) and 
spiritual flesh (wisdom) to nourish, upbuild and sus- 
tain each other. 

It is by these divine offices of imparting each to the 
other and to all, in a degree, these divine, social- 
spiritual foods, by ways, words and works of love and 
use, and by eating one another mutually and function- 
ally, that the social, spiritual-celestial man is made 
to otherize himself — to build himself into his entire 
social environment of souls and into the higher soci- 
eties of the spiritual and celestial universes of God. 

. . . 'That they all may be one: as thou. Father, 
art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one 
in us," — thus not only making the terrestro-social 
man one in spiritual life with his fellows but one 
and at-one with the higher celestial men and women 
of the spiritual worlds, for in very truth, when prop- 
erly discerned, this is the great "Atonement/' — the 
Son with the Father, — ^the brotherhood of man with 
the Fatherhood of God. 



THE HIGHER CONSCIOUSNESS. 

''Consciousness," as one has well said, "is the visi- 
ble scene of the soul." It is the parliament of mind. 
In that vast theater of mind, the higher forms of 
spiritual man, especially, view the whole scene of con- 

90 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

flict in this human life of ours — this 'Visible scene of 
man" ; and, by and through its parallaxes, its conflicts 
and its stars, shares in these conflicts and makes them 
his own. Here in this parliament of the soul, the con- 
flicting forces in the virtuous soul of Hercules fought 
out the battle 'twixt virtue and pleasure or vice. 

But consciousness and its contents are dual — the 
higher consciousness and its forms, and the lower 
consciousness and its forms. The former in its 
higher planes and aspects belong to the celestial-spirit- 
ual man; and its contents are the loves, wisdoms, 
benevolences, affections and sympathies of the celestial 
man. The latter or the inferior consciousness is one 
that we possess in common with the animal world; 
and its contents are the lower knowledges of the 
animal world, together with all its array of animal 
propensities, passions, appetites, desires, impulses, etc. 
The higher or *'new consciousness," — termed the 
''new man," "the second man," the ''Lord from the 
heavens" — is the intelligent, rational consciousness 
that properly belongs only to that higher plane of 
existence; the higher, more advanced celestial-spirit- 
ual man, who is at once Creator and Lord of the 
heavens and the earths. This newer and higher con- 
sciousness is fully shared only by man in his higher 
and more advanced and potential degrees and states; 
and, also, by man in his pure celestial states, ere he 
descends to terrestrial planes to reincarnate with the 
animal man, or "first man," as it is termed in the 
Word. 

Both bee and man work with marvelous intelli- 
gence ; but while the intelligence of the bee stops with 
the conclusion of his work, the intelligence of the man 
may go a step farther, and give a reason for his work ; 
why, how, upon what principles, for what purpose or 
purposes, etc., it was accomplished. In other words, 
he is endowed with a new and vastly higher factor in 
the realm of conscious intelligence ; one that does not 
exist, so far as known, in the bee, nor to any very 
high degree in the lower forms of mankind. 

In the play of the personal forces of the individual 

91 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

between the higher and lower planes of the conscious- 
ness lies one of the greatest sources of error in esti- 
mating the validity and justness of our own motives 
and intentions and those of others. I discovered early 
in life that philosophy had to make a very important 
distinction between the intentions, or the conscious 
intelligent purposes of the man; those motives which 
he has fully weighed, measured and approved ration- 
ally, as beneficial to himself and his ''neighbor," and 
those motives, impulses, passions, etc., which being 
of the animal order of existence, and lying below the 
higher or spiritual and rational plane, and upon the 
lower, less visible, or wholly invisible planes of being, 
escape the notice of the man, for the simple reason he 
has not been sufficiently reincarnated, and, hence, has 
not yet had time to round up his being to that higher 
plane where ''his deeds are made manifest'' to his 
higher consciousness. 

So true is this, that one whose soul hath been led 
up by the evolutions of past and present incarnations 
on to that higher plane of consciousness, sees in all 
the acts and actors of time and world only a reflex 
of himself; and every such deed as but the natural 
reflex of forces he sees within him; each actor but 
as an alter ego or other self, occupying whose place 
in the sphere he himself would have enacted a similar 
role. In truth, he will often exclaim with the philoso- 
pher, who on hearing of some unusual deed said, 
"Why, I was there, too ;'' or with Bishop Newton who, 
on seeing a malefactor on his way to Tyburn, said 
"But for the grace of God, there goes John Newton ;'' 
for the vaticinal consciousness of the divine, celestial 
man spans the entire universe of life; in it he sees 
the operation of all its most visible and invisible forces 
and their laws; and by and through them learns "to 
justify the ways of God to man/' 

Still all must work, each in his own way, as he 
sees the light and the work ; each must enact his part 
in his own way on the great amphitheater of time and 
man. And all are needed there, since each and all the 
various human terrestrial, as well as spiritual, forces 

92 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

limit, temper and restrain each other, while the higher 
lead. 

Said Madame De Stael, ''Russia is an absolute des- 
potism, tempered by assassination/' 

Yea, verily, the Nihilist, even though his theory of 
government be a worthless and senseless caricature 
of the real and the true, holds up the even scales of 
justice before the eyes of the Czar, follows him into the 
secret chambers of the palace and of the soul, and 
makes him tremble in the presence of his own vast 
responsibilities and duties to his people and to man- 
kind. 

It is in truth this higher rational, divine conscious- 
ness that spans the worlds ; yea, the very universes of 
being, and enspheres terrestrial man at last into a 
conscious, living, eternal brotherhood; one among the 
living brotherhoods of the living worlds, under the 
living fatherhood of the living God. 



LIVE IN THE SPIRIT. 

"Nothing in the world is single; 

All things by a law Divine 
In one another's being mingle." 

It IS the law and condition of the universe itself 
which is provided, as is the human system, with a 
most marvelous nerve system that unites soul with 
soul, suns with suns, and their worlds, universes with 
universes, and all things With God — ithe Supreme 
Being. 

It is through this sublime and beautiful nerve sys- 
tem, that unites the one and the all, that souls derive 
their spiritual nutrition from other similar organic 
beings around and above them — a function of the 
mind symbolized by the Christ in that marvelous ex- 
pression : "Except ye eat of the flesh of the son of man, 

93 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

and drink his blood, ye have no life in you/' An ex- 
pression literally true, for in this sense we are all 
more or less cannibals and mutually eat and drink 
of each other. 

Yea, all things of this glorious universe of the liv- 
ing God throb, vibrate, thrill and are nourished and 
sustained from the tides that forever flow from high 
to low, from low to high, through the veins, nerves 
and arteries of universal life. 

This society already so formed, and to form, let 
me hope, in the future, for the protection and up- 
building of all, will supply the angelic societies of 
spirit life with those terrestrial-spiritual, or basic, 
forces, which, combined with those coming from the 
highest spheres of spirit life, shall enable them to 
create a spiritual atmosphere that shall environ its 
members, and that shall act in like manner as does the 
terrestrial atmosphere — as a buffer against the 
meteoric missies that daily bombard the planet by 
billions, and would be a source of perpetual menace 
to its inhabitants were they not most of them speedily 
consumed upon entering it. In like way shall these 
dark meteoric spiritual bodies be, most of them, con- 
sumed as to their lusts and hatreds and ignorance by 
entering the pure spiritualized atmosphere that shall 
invest the persons of all who shall become practical 
members of this divine society which is speedily des- 
tined to encircle the world in its benign enfoldments. 

Such a society, when it has been perfected, by the 
spiritual forces of the higher life of man immortal, 
will become a potent instrument in the hands of the 
angels for the divine healing — mental, material, spirit- 
ual — for all who are connected therewith, and who 
may feel the need of such harmonization and bal- 
ancing up of their physical and psychical powers ; and 
few do not. It will create a vast fund of spiritual 
forces upon which all its members may rely for their 
healing, as well as development and protection. For 
these divine potencies of spiritual life go hand in 
hand. 

Beloved friends, let us unite to set a ball in motion 

94 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

that, like the snowball on the mountain side, shall 
speedily sweep from its pathway every obstacle that is 
hostile to the progressive life of man. 

Let us live in the spirit, in mutual good will, good 
wishes, good aspirations, inspirations and invocations 
in behalf of each other and of all. It will do more 
toward developing our mutual spiritual powers; to aid 
the sick ones in spirit life, that come to us for light, 
sympathy and help; and to protect each and all from 
the assaults of evil and deceiving spirits, than can 
be accomplished in any other way. 



CONCERNING INFESTATIONS AND THE 
CASTING OUT OF EVIL SPIRITS. 

"If I by Beelzebub cast out devils, by whom do 
your children cast them out?" — Luke xi., 19. 

"He cast out spirits with his word/' — Matt, viii., 16. 

"And the seventy returned again with joy, saying, 
Lord even the devils are subject unto us through thy 
word/' — Luke x., 17. 

"And his name went throughout all Syria : and they 
brought unto him all sick that were taken with divers 
diseases and torments, and those that were possessed 
with devils, and those which were lunatics, and he 
healed them.'' Matt, iv., 24. 

"And he ordained twelve that they should be with 
him and that he might send them forth and to have 
power to heal the sick and to cast out devils." — Luke 
ix., I. 

"And he healed many that were sick of divers dis- 
eases, and cast out many devils, and suffered not the 
devils to speak, for they knew him." — Mark i., 34. 

"Then was brought unto him one possessed with a 
devil, blind and dumb: and he healed him insomuch 

95 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

that the blind and dumb both spake and saw." — Matt. 
xii., 22, 

*'If any man believe in me, the works that I do shall 
he do also, and greater works shall he do because I 
go to the Father," 

''And these signs shall follow them that believe: In 
my name shall they cast out devils: they shall speak 
with new tongues ***** ^h^y sj^g^jj j^y hands 
upon the sick and they shall recover." — Mark xvi., 17, 
18. 

''And he came down with them and stood in the 
plain and in the company of his disciples, and a great 
multitude of people * * * came to be healed of their 
diseases: and they that were vexed with unclean 
spirits: and they were healed. And the whole multi- 
tude sought to touch him: for there went virtue out 
of him, and healed them all," 

"And one of the multitude answered him and said, 
Master, I have brought unto thee my son, who hath 
a dumb spirit. 

"And wheresoever he taketh him he teareth him: 
and he foameth and gnasheth with his teeth and pineth 
away: and I spake to thy disciples that they should 
cast him out : and they could not. He answereth him 
and saith. Oh, faithless generation, how long shall I 
be v/ith you: how long shall I suffer you? Bring 
him unto me. And they brought him: and when he 
saw him, straightway the spirit tare him, and he fell 
on the ground and Vv^allowed, foaming. And he asked 
the father: how long is it ago since this came unto 
him, and he said of a child, * * * When Jesus saw 
that the people came running together he rebuked the 
FOUL SPiRiT_, saying unto him, thou deaf and dumb 
spirit, I charge thee come out of him and enter no more 
into him. And the spirit cried and rent him sore, and 
came out of him, and he was as one dead, so that many 
said: he is dead. But Jesus took him by the hand 
and lifted him up and he arose." — Mark ix., 14. 

"Now John, when he heard in prison the works of 
Christ, he sent two of his disciples, and said untp 
him, Art thou he that should come, or should we look 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

for another ? Jesus answered and said unto them, Go 
and show John those things that ye do hear and see. 
The bHnd receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers 
are cleansed, the dead are raised up, the deaf hear and 
the poor have the Gospel preached to them/' 

The above is the testimony of Jesus to John in re- 
gard to his reasons for doing the manifold and mighty 
works which he did among the people: to establish 
the truth of his mission as the true Messiah, long 
promised to the people of the Jews, and through 
them a light to all the nations of the earth. We have 
copied thus copiously from the text of the New Tes- 
tament as we desired to place at once before the mind 
of the reader those great works alleged to have been 
wrought by the master in attestation of his mission to 
mankind as the latest and the greatest of the Avatars 
(or *Trom-the- Fathers'') that have incarnated to 
teach and to save men. 

But the chief question I desire to raise in this con- 
nection relates to His mission as a healer — one en- 
dowed with great power to heal the diseases of man- 
kind, and also to impart to others a like gift of heal- 
ing. 

One would judge from the way the church has 
turned its back upon this class of physicians, and have 
steadfastly ignored the subject as a body of teachers 
and ministers, that the entire church has wholly put 
aside as void and of no binding influence or obliga- 
tion upon it the whole doctrine of Jesus concerning 
the healing of the sick, the casting out of devils and 
other evil spirits, or that these persons in the other 
life can and do infest human beings that are resident 
in the flesh, not only with their diseases, but also with 
themselves, and may and do inflict great and serious 
injury upon them in this way. Yes, did Jesus and His 
disciples in truth cast out demons and evil spirits, or 
were they ^'spooks" or imaginary beings that existed 
in nothing save in the ignorant and superstitious fears 
of foolish people? Could Jesus himself have been 
mistaken ? Is it possible that he did not know whereof 
he spake so positively, and that what he took for an 

97 



MAWS' PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

infestation from some invisible evil spirit or man was 
(and is) nothing more nor less than a deranged con- 
dition of some portion or the whole of the material 
organism of the sick man himself, and that the idea 
of spiritual invisible beings having anything to do 
with it? "'Why, that," says science — pseudo-science — - 
is nothing less than a silly superstition that has no 
existence except in the disordered brain of some 
lunatic !'' 

And yet, say what we may, think what we like, con- 
cerning this remarkable subject, Jesus was perfectly 
right, and His disciples, when they healed the sick, 
many of whom were made sick in this manner by the 
presence of some sick spirit that has invaded and is 
infesting the person of the sick one. 

Yes, it is a great, a weighty and an important 
truth that such a state of things exists on the border 
line of the two worlds and will continue to exist there 
until science, genuine, not false science, shall take up 
the subject, investigate it thoroughly, and apply the 
proper remedies. Yes, the man Christ Jesus not only 
has given the correct diagnosis, but in His treatment 
of the sick He gave the appropriate remedy — His own 
personal loves and magnetisms. Let bigots and charla- 
tans say what they may to the contrary, notwith- 
standing. 

Yes, true science will ere long take up this important 
question, not as heretofore, with a sneer upon its lips 
to cover up its own dense ignorance upon the subject, 
but with an honest determination to get at the bottom 
facts. With a proper knowledge of this great and 
vitally important feature in the occult life of man, 
and the application of the proper remedies, our insane 
hospitals would become empty in no very great length 
of time. But they never can so long as medical 
bigotry presides over the legislation of mankind. 

Yes, among the words and the works that the be- 
loved teacher gave to men, none are more weighty 
or of greater importance to human welfare than are 
those which relate to the sick of spirit life and their 

98 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

relation to many of the diseases of this life, let ignor* 
ance and bigotry sneer as it may. Yes, — 

'Truth crushed to earth shall rise again 
The eternal years of God are hers." 

And those who imagine that Christ taught as He 
did in regard to these matters because he was ignor- 
ant of the real facts, do but stultify this greatest of 
all the teachers that ever came down from the spiritual 
heavens to instruct mankind. 

'1 am come a light into the world that whosoever 
believeth on me should not abide in darkness, and if 
any man hear my words and believe not I judge him 
not: for I came not to judge the world, but to save 
the world.'' — Jno. xii., 46. 

''My doctrine is not mine, but his that sent me." 
What sublime and glorious testimony! '1 am not 
come of myself, but He that sent mie is true whom ye 
know not: But I know him: for I am from him and 
He hath sent me.'' — Jno. vii., 28. 

Yes, the greatest and the most vitally important of 
those doctrines that concern the life and the health of 
mankind so far as his bodily conditions are affected 
by occult forces and influences from decarnate spirits, 
are those taught by the Master when he was living in 
the flesh. 

If any man will but cast aside his theological preju- 
dices for a time and will carefully look into the facts, 
he need not lack for examples that will leave no doubt 
in his mind that Jesus told the exact truth concerning 
all these matters, and gave the true causes of them. 

Robert <j. Ingersoll once expressed his regret that 
*'he did not have the making of things, otherwise he 
would have made health catching instead of disease." 
But that was one of Robert's mistakes. Health is 
catching, and vastly more so than disease, otherwise 
the whole race of mankind would have perished long 
ago. 

It is often said of Americans that they are a race of 
^'health hunters/' and it is indeed quite true. But it is 
due in great degree to the fact that they are more 

L OF C. ^ 



MAWS PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

advanced in many ways than the balance of humanity, 
and hence have become more sensitive to the ills that 
flesh is heir to. 

Now, this health-hunting business is not confined 
only to this life, but extends also to the next one. 
Now, this pursuit of health is the chief reason why 
human beings are ^'infested" by so many of the deni- 
zens of the spiritual world. They are the sick of the 
spiritual world, and many of them are like the people 
of this world — looking for health which is just as dear 
to them as it is to ourselves. 

They come to mortals in the flesh to obtain their 
magnetisms and for the same reason that the sick 
man of this world applies to the healer for his mag- 
netisms, which are more healthful and health-inspiring 
than his own. Some of the infesting spirits, it is true, 
come for other reasons, sometimes for revenge. 

Such persons are evil spirits and infest human be- 
ings for evil purposes. But the greater portion of 
them are the morally, mentally and spiritually sick 
people of the spiritual world, who come to us mortals 
for help — to get rid of their diseased magnetisms — 
their impure and diseased blood, and to take into 
themselves the purer and more healthful blood of those 
who are morally and mentally more pure and healthy. 

Blood in the animal body corresponds to love in the 
spiritual body, for love is the blood of the spiritual 
man, and hence the great truth and beauty of that 
statement of the Master: "He that eateth my flesh 
(wisdom) and drinketh my blood hath eternal 
life. * * * For my flesh is meat indeed and my blood 
is drink indeed." It is this love that saves — this heav- 
enly bread, this purer, sweeter, holier love, or spiritual 
blood and bread, *'that cometh down from heaven" and 
its higher societies of divine men and women. 

For in truth this healing blood (and bread) doth 
not belong to Christ alone, but to all Christ-men and 
women, for Jesus spoke these words as a representative 
man of the higher orders of men and women of our 
world, and as their spiritual head. 

Yes, it is this need of help from the terrestro- 

100 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

spiritual forces of human life, and which they can find 
nowhere else, that brings so many of the spirit sick 
to people in the flesh to find those whom they may 
control and in whom they may find these forces for the 
palliation or the cure of the various evils from which 
they suffer. But the help they may obtain in this 
way is only very partial, unless aided by science and 
the co-operation of angels, so that hospitals have in 
recent years been established to assist in their treat- 
ment. Many of these spirit sick ones are evil minded, 
and seek to find such mortals as they can personally 
control, and being persons of very reckless and inhar- 
monious character, they invade the persons of such 
weak-willed people as they can control — actually enter 
into and take ''possession" of their persons. Such 
persons are said to be ''possessed," and such they are ; 
both are insane, but the one that is in earth life is 
in the worst condition of the twain. Many of these 
spirits are malignant, and such Jesus characterized 
as devils, or do-evils, for such they are when they come 
to mortals with evil intent, as they impart their own 
ills to them in exaggerated form. 

That spirits impart their diseased conditions to per- 
sons in the flesh, consult Swedenborg in his Heaven 
and Hell. 

It is only within half of a century that hospitals of 
one and another kind began tO' be formed for the 
treatment of the sick of spirit life, and vast numbers 
of them since then have been treated for the ills they 
suffered from while living in the flesh. 

The means and the methods so employed by the 
angels resemble much those made use of by the 
"Salvation Army" people, with the exception that those 
employed by the angels are vastly more extended, 
embrace a vaster number of subjects and are more 
perfectly adapted to the needs and requirements of 
spiritual beings than are those of that noble body of 
self consecrated men and women that are included in 
the Salvation Army. Untold thousands of the great, 
the wise and the good of the very highest spheres of 
spirit life have become missionaries, many of them 

lOI 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

descending into the lowest spheres of spirit life and 
mingling freely with the lowest and the humblest 
citizens, many of them such as in this life were re- 
garded as among the basest of mankind, and carry 
with them life and light and love and hope and music, 
and all things lovely and beautiful and cheering and 
inspiring to the heart of man. 

The lower spheres of spirit life, with their untold 
billions of people, vast numbers of whom have lived 
in them these thousands of years past, have become a 
vast theatre for missionary enterprise, and millions 
are engaged in the glorious work. 

For in truth, in the spirit world, and more truly than 
in this world, for these are the "times of the restitu- 
tion of all things," when the higher and more ad- 
vanced classes of mankind, who in this life tyrannized 
over and oppressed their brethren, and put burdens 
upon them intolerable to be borne, and practically 
deprived them of their immortal birthright to life, 
liberty and happiness, are now given the opportunity 
to ''lay judgment to the line and righteousness to the 
plummet," and thousands of these are descend- 
ing into the lower spheres to look up these humble 
spiritual wards and brothers of theirs whom they 
have neglected for so long, and are bringing them out 
of the dark 'Valley of the shadow of death" and into 
God's blessed and eternal sunlight of joy and peace. 
The time is now nearly at an end when the rich and 
the powerful can spend the earnings of the poor in 
riotous living, depriving them of the means to make 
life a joy and a proper preparation and stepping stone 
to the order, the system and the sublime glories and 
splendors of the life eternal. 

Yes, one of the greatest and most important truths 
that Jesus has imparted to mankind is the knowledge 
of the fact that mankind in the flesh may be, and 
most of them are, influenced by decarnated spirits, 
both good and bad, and according to the character of 
the returning spirit will be the influence that he will 
exert upon the person or persons living in the form, 
whether it shall be of a healthful or an infestational 

IQ2 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

character. It is by virtue of this marvelous relation 
existing among and between human beings living in 
the material form and out of it that many persons in 
this world are enabled to accomplish great good by 
faith and prayer and the intervention of angels. 
Let us take for example the case of Dr. Barnardo and 
George Muller, of London, England, who have, by 
the exercise of prayer and faith, been able to rear, 
educate and maintain more than 60,000 orphan chil- 
dren. Really and truly the work of raising the more 
than $15,000,000 that were raised and expended in 
these labors of love in caring and providing for these 
waifs of humanity during the many years these noble 
men have been engaged in this great work, has been 
one of the functions and the duties of decarnate men 
or angels. They — the angels — influence and teach in 
a similar manner, viz., by strongly impressing their 
views upon the leaders of mankind. They not only 
impart ideas in this way ; they set up or pull down the 
leaders of mankind accordingly as they serve or fail 
to serve the best intersts of human kind. In Dan. iv., 
17, we are given an example of this interference on 
the part of the statesmen of the spiritual world with 
the affairs of human life. "This matter is by the 
decree of the watchers" — those statesmen whose duty 
it is to watch over human life and to carefully study 
the effects of those measures which have already been 
introduced to accomplish their intended results — "and 
the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the in- 
tent that the living may know that the Most High 
ruleth in the kingdom of men and giveth it to whom- 
soever he will and (often) setteth up over it the 
basest of men.'' 

The "holy ones" are manifestly those higher spiritual 
teachers, and statesmen who, by their superior wisdom, 
are such as determine the policies and measures to 
be adopted at the various stages and crises in human 
affairs. 

Several of the books of the Old Testament are filled 
with accounts of these interferences by the higher 
powers with the affairs of the Jews, who were repeat- 

103 



MAN'S. PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

edly sent into exile or involved in desolating wars, or 
punished in some manner by having set over them 
''the basest of men/' and for hundreds of years. 

In this way they got rid of the idolators, so much 
so that at last the Jews are a united nation and people, 
a cosmopolitan race that are probably more numerous 
than at any time in their past history, and are more 
true to their religion, their country and their home, 
though living under all skies the world over, than any 
other race, nation, tribe or people to be found anywhere 
on the face of the whole earth. They have become 
thoroughbreds, and the only people on the footstool 
who steadfastly worship the only one, true God. 



JESUS AND JUDAS. 

'That the Scriptures might be fulfilled.* — Jesus. 

"For this purpose have I raised thee up.'* — Jehovah 
to Pharaoh. 

''I form the light and create darkness. I make 
peace and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things.'' 
— Jehovah to Jeremiah. 

"Shall the clay say to him that shapeth it. What 
makest thou ?" — Ibid. 

The human mind can conceive of no greater con- 
trast than is presented by these two greatest of the 
actors that wrought in this greatest and grandest of 
the world's tragedies. And yet there is another side 
and another light in which the divine humanity is 
destined to view this vast drama that involves worlds in 
its fulfillment. 

For the great Architect of all the worlds worketh 
by wise plans, some of which are not so easily com- 
prehended by man In his early spiritual conditions and 
estates, and must patiently abide the time when his 
Creator shall permit him to have a better knowledge 
of the ways, means and methods by which he works 

104 



'MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

out the vast plans, purposes and problems of an in- 
finite universe. 

"For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither 
are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the 
heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways 
higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your 
thoughts.'' — Isaiah i., 8, 9. 

Yes, the Creator, our own Heavenly Father, is often 
obliged to employ human means for the furtherance 
and the execution of His mighty plans and purposes . 
in the field of creation that appear questionable and 
even worse in the eyes of the uninstructed man, who 
does not understand the wisdom, power or the needs 
of the Creator in the choice of His means and instru- 
mentalities for the accomplishment of His great and 
wise purposes. 

Among the most important of the instruments se- 
lected by Jehovah for the accomplishment of His great 
and beneficent plans for the uplifting and salvation of 
mankind, we must regard those of Pharaoh and Judas 
to have been the most important of all the baser means 
which He employed in their execution. Taking the case 
of Pharaoh, whom Jehovah (Lord) informed that: 
"For this very cause he had raised him up to show 
in thee my power and that my name may be declared 
among all the nations of the earth." 

The Lord had two very important objects to ac- 
complish in raising up this man Rameses and seating 
him upon the throne of the Pharaohs at the time He 
purposed to return the Israelites to their original home 
in Palestine, and one of these objects was to make 
the very name of the Egyptian king and his people, 
and even the very land of Egypt, utterly and forever 
hateful to them by the beastly tyrannies and oppres- 
sions which they would experience at the hands of both 
king and people, so that they would never in the future 
have any desire to return to the land of their op- 
pressors, though it was at the same time the land of 
their fathers, and had been for the past four hundred 
years. What Jehovah intended to accomplish by His 
treatment of Pharaoh was to spread abroad among the 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

nations many wonderful reports — many of which 
would be greatly exaggerated — of his wonderful deal- 
ings with Pharaoh and his two peoples, but were 
more especially intended for the peoples of Palestine, 
to cause them to stand in awe of the Jews and their 
God and to thus render their entrance into Palestine 
and their final settlement there more easy of ac- 
complishment. 

At one time, when the heart of Pharaoh relented 
under the terrible discipline of Jehovah, and was 
minded to let his people go, Jehovah interfered and 
''hardened Pharaoh's heart," in order that he might 
have the opportunity to chastise both the king and his 
two peoples a while longer, until all should become 
wholly sick of each other and willing and anxious to 
forever separate and be quit of each other — without 
any desire to ever return. 

For the eternal God was engaged in the business of 
accouching a great nation, and one that was and yet 
is destined to play a marvelous role in the affairs of 
human civilization. This disciplinary course pursued 
toward the Jewish people by the higher powers of the 
spiritual world has been continued down to the pres- 
ent time. They have been exiled in greater or less 
extent, several times during the past 3,500 years, until 
they have become a race of religious thoroughbreds, 
that will stand by their religion through thick and thin 
and under all circumstances the world over — the ex- 
ample of a great people that, without home, country 
or liberty, and never has been permitted access to the 
land in any other country, have, despite all, and in all 
countries, maintained their autocracy, nationality and 
their religion in the most marvelous way of any 
people that has ever struck time. 

This disciplinary dispensation will not, cannot, in 
the very nature of the situation in Europe, be gotten 
rid of fully and finally until "the fulness of the Gentiles 
has come in; or, in other words, until the tyrannies 
that Jews, in common with all other old world 
peoples suffer from, have been wholly and forever 
removed, and free governments for all have been 

106 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

established in their places. They can never be gotten 
rid of until the millennial era, now coming in the midst 
of the most terrible wars, whose final object is intended 
for the removal of the obstacles that stand in the 
way of the realization of this marvelous era of uni- 
versal love, joy, peace and fraternity when these great 
difficulties in the path of the divine humanity have 
been fully and finally and forever taken away. 

For the new civilization, the ''new heavens and the 
new earth," can never be fully introduced and laid 
upon its living and eternal foundations until every 
last vestige of the old materialistic civilization has been 
utterly and everlastingly destroyed and taken from 
the earth. And that new civilization is the new city 
described by John in Rev. xxi., 1-27. In Rev. xviii., 
1-24, we have a vivid description of the old Babylonish 
civilization and the manner of its utter overthrow and 
destruction, in the 21st verse of that chapter. 

In the case of Judas we have an equally plain ex- 
ample of one who has been foreordained by the higher 
powers to the execution of a certain part in the great 
tragedy of Jesus and the cross. 

''I speak not of you all," said Jesus on that mem- 
orable night. ''I know whom I have chosen: But that 
the Scripture may be fulfilled, he that eateth bread with 
me hath lifted up his heel against me !" 

We have in this and in other Bible passages a plain 
intimation that it was both foreseen and also fore- 
intended by the higher powers that someone should 
perform that part in the great tragedy, but it is also 
plainly stated by the Master, both here and elsewhere 
in the gospels. 

Jesus even proceeds so far as to prompt Judas to 
hurry up the dreadful work, and not keep him any 
longer than possible in dread suspense. "That thou 
doest, do quickly." Fearful, too, probably, lest Judas 
should falter in his purpose, and His own plans and 
purposes for the completion of His great life work 
for the salvation of mankind should in some way be 
deferred or defeated altogether. 

Then, too, He might not have been sure of Him- 

107 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

self — of His own ability to maintain Himself in that 
sublime height of passion He had wrought himself 
up into in order to sustain Him in His endurance of 
His terrible self-inflicted ordeal! That thou doest, 
do quickly/' "Be sure of yourself and of the ac- 
complishment of your purpose, and don't keep me in 
this fearful suspense any longer than necessary!'' 

In this manner he even appeals to the mercy of 
Judas, and entreats him to be as expeditious as pos- 
sible in the execution of his purpose and not to hold 
Him in that tremendous, heart-rending agony of un- 
certainty and doubt which He soon after manifested in 
the garden when He retired by himself to intercede 
with His heavenly Father. ''If it be possible, let this 
cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not as I will, but as 
thou wih!" 

It is the loftiest sublimity of heroism — the scene, 
the passion, the actor, are blended, as it were, in one, 
the greatest, grandest and most terribly glorious ever 
endured upon this dear old earth or elsewhere by gods 
or men. 

The magnitude and importance of the part enacted 
by the man Judas appears never to have been fully 
understood in its highest significance down to the 
present time. Mankind appears to have been content 
to receive the benefits of a salvation purchased by the 
assassination of the man Jesus, but curse the authors 
of it, and especially the man Judas. If the tragic 
death of Christ upon the cross and the part taken in 
it by Judas could have easily been omitted, is it not 
plain to see that the authorities of the spiritual world 
who oversee and superintend the affairs of human 
civilization (see Dan. iv., 17) would never have put 
Him into such tragic and awful experiences? ''And 
I, if I be lifted up, shall drazv all men unto me!' Such 
is the estimate of the value placed upon it by the 
Master himself in one of His discourses to His dis- 
ciples some time before His death. And it is a sub- 
lime truth. Yes, give a little longer time for the 
operation of the benign principles involved in the life, 
death and sufferings of Christ to produce their natural 

108 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

effects upon mankind, it will be found that this divine 
humanity of ours has been integrally united and crys- 
tallized centrally about this man Jesus. 

Yes, as elsewhere stated, this wonderful bulletin of 
the cross and all its containments has been the great- 
est driving and uplifting force connected with all 
Christianity ; yea, with civilization itself. 

The vast importance of the relation which this man 
Judas sustains, and will ever sustain, to this sublime 
inter-world's tragedy, will never be fully unfolded and 
understood until man himself has risen up to a better 
luiderstanding of the nature, the duties and responsi- 
bilities of the Creator Himself in all His relations with 
mankind. His own dear children, both in this world, 
the other world and all worlds. That the higher au- 
thorities of the spirit world — yea, the Father Himself — 
believed it to be indispensable to the salvation of 
mankind that Jesus should come down to this world 
and suffer many things from the Jews, "and be killed," 
there can be no doubt in the mind of any student of the 
Bible. 

Also that the Fatherhood, by whom He was sent, 
believed that His suffering, betrayal and death were 
a very needful part, yea, sustained a positive relation 
thereto of untold value to the scheme of human re- 
demption, is equally evident from all the evidence in 
the case, especially if we consider the tender and 
touching appeal of Jesus to His heavenly Father when 
in His awful agony in the garden, he besought Him 
to release Him from the dreadful ordeal if the plan 
of salvation could be successfully completed without 
such a terrible sacrifice! ''Oh, my Father, if it be 
possible, let this cup pass from me. Nevertheless, not 
as I will, but as thou wilt.'^ And again He went away 
and prayed, saying: "Oh, my Father, if this cup may 
not pass away from me except I drink it, thy will 
be done!" So that "an angel from heaven appeared 
unto him, strengthening him." 

How unutterably sad and agonizing is this appeal 
to His heavenly Father to stay the enactment of a 
death so inconceivably tragical and awful! But the 

109 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

heavens refuse any stay of the dread sentence, though 
an angel is sent to comfort and strengthen Him against 
His appalling sorrows, sufferings and death. 

But the heavens are dumb to His piteous appeal to 
stay the execution of a death so inconceivably cruel 
and awful. No pitying hand is extended to arrest the 
execution of the terrible impending sentence — ^the 
awful spectacle of a God expiring on the cross in the 
midst of unutterable agonies is too absolutely necessary 
to the fulfillment and perfection of His own and His 
Father's scheme for the salvation of a world, is too 
imperative and absolute, to admit of any arrest or 
even delay in its enactment. And the terrible Fates 
move forward ! No stop ! No stay ! To the onward 
march of the eternal destinies! 

'"My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" 
are His last expiring and despairing words when sus- 
pended upon the cross. 

"Father, forgive them, for they know not what they 
do/' is one of the last of the loving words to which 
He gave utterance while hanging on the cross and wit- 
nessing the frenzied mob as they sought to increase 
the keenness of His expiring agonies. 

And it is for the perfection of this sublime plan 
and purpose of the spiritual heavens to arrest the 
attention of this densely ignorant, unspiritual child- 
man and cause him to look up, set him to thinking 
upon spiritual things and induce him to forsake his 
sins and lead a new life before God, angels and men. 
For the perfection of this wonderful scheme for the 
redemption of a world, this mighty advertisement of 
the everlasting divine word, the man Judas was em- 
ployed by the angelic authorities of the spiritual world 
to supply the darkest part of the dark background in 
the picture that was to furnish a proper setting for 
the sublime spiritual lights, the moral grandeurs and 
glories displayed by the divine God-man during His 
unutterable sorrows, anguishes and agonies in the 
garden, at the trial and while suspended 'twixt heaven 
and earth upon the cruel cross. The picture is perfect. 

no 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

We look in vain for anything that approaches it in 
tragic grandeur and sublime, infinite glory! 

No wonder that the Father refused to release Him 
from enacting His part in the mighty all-worlds drama 
and tragedy, for such it is. 

"And I, if I be lifted up, shall draw all men unto 
me." 

And so it is and will be until the whole world shall 
be lifted up into the eternal brotherhood of man, and 
into perfect harmony with the Fatherhood of the Gods. 

To assist the angels in their wondrous plan for the 
moral and spiritual evolution of the divine man this 
man Judas was specially incarnated. His treachery 
toward his teacher and noblest friend; his conspiracy 
against him with the priests; his sale of Christ for a 
few paltry ^'pieces of silver"; his speedy and terrible 
remorse at the consequences of his treason; his self 
immolation and execution, are all necessary features 
in the mighty picture and wholly indispensable to the 
perfect fulfillment of the purposes of the Gods. 

To prepare himself for the execution of his part 
in this business of the spiritual uplifting of a world, 
it became necessary for him to spiritually degrade him- 
self and to incarnate in a sphere and in a family of a 
lower order morally than the one he had previously 
been attached to in that life, in order that he might 
become suitably conditioned for the base part he 
was to play therein. It was an act of much heroism 
on his part; one that has cost him the execrations 
and the curses of mankind for nearly 2,000 years, be- 
sides centuries of hard work to regain lost ground. 
There is no authority that can repeal the law that gov- 
erns the action of fire on the person of the man that 
falls into it, no matter what may have been his motive 
in getting there. 

He can only be aided in escaping from its ef5fects 
by an act of forgiveness toward him on the part of 
mankind that will eventually lift him up out of them. 
But will they grant it? Most assuredly, yes! 

Ill 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

Jesus forgave His enemies even when, suspended on 
the cross, they were tormenting Him. And He has 
not only bid us to imitate Him in the exercise of this 
simple act of magnanimity towards those who in some 
way have been estranged from us, but He has also 
put it as a prior condition to our being forgiven by our 
heavenly Father that we also forgive our enemies, 
and the eternal law in itself is equally mandatory in its 
demands upon us in this respect. 

*Tor if ye forgive men their trespasses, your 
heavenly Father will also forgive you. But if ye for- 
give not men their trespasses, neither will your Father 
forgive your trespasses.'' The law is absolute and 
eternal. Yea, the churches must learn to exercise a 
broader and deeper spirit of love and charity toward 
all men everywhere, and to that end they must practice 
a greater charity toward each other and toward the 
man Judas, who has sinned more deeply against old 
theology than against reason, justice and the eternal 
truth of things. It will beget a newer and more 
catholic spirit in them, that will bind them more per- 
fectly together in one as an irresistible force to com- 
plete the evangelization of the world. And to the 
more perfect accomplishment of this most glorious 
consummation of all good, the perfect union and har- 
mony of the forces of civilization, the churches must 
study more deeply the functionation of the divine 
humanity, not only among the churches themselves, 
but everywhere in all conditions, states, estates and 
offices that exist among the whole vast family of man. 

They must look more deeply into the universal and 
eternal causes of sin and transgression by man of the 
eternal law itself. For, as the beloved Socrates has so 
well stated the facts: ''Vice is ignorance: Virtue is 
knowledge/' Yes, vice is simply ignorance concreted 
in the life of man, and virtue is its polaric opposite. 

For this will become the creation of a new spirit, 
which in truth is a holy spirit — the holy spirit, or spirit 
of the whole. For the holy spirit, the ^'Pneuma 
Agion/' is the harmonious coaction of every office and 
organ, every force and function in universal life, as 

112 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

that life proceedeth outward to consummate creation 
in all its infinite departments of being. It forms the 
infinite holo-cosmos that embraces within one vast 
sweep of conscious and coactive energy all forces and 
forms of beings create and increate — the universal 
harmonium and oversoul. God over all and blessed 
forevermore. 

It is this "spirit of the whole" that presides over 
the conception of men and of nations that are ''raised 
up" to perform some special, important office in the 
divine humanity. And it was this holy spirit that 
brooded over the parents of the beloved Christ in their 
incarnating conception of this minister plenipotentiary, 
healer and teacher that descended from the skies to 
organ every force and function in universal life, as 
earth, to illuminate, to heal, to instruct and to bless 
mankind. It was the literal rendering of certain pass- 
ages in the genealogy of Jesus that caused the church 
to make the mistake of supposing that Jesus was begot- 
ten without earthly father — a mistake, however, that, 
like many another literal translation of the Word, hath 
been a source of spiritual profit up to a certain era in 
the life of humanity, when the literal and symbolical 
sense of the Word must give place to the spiritual and 
scientific sense of it, for the spiritual freedoms and 
other spiritual uses of the thousands who are marching 
forward into the new dispensation. 

It is the inability to see and the unwillingness to 
permit these beneficent changes and transitions that 
hath heretofore created so much and terrible friction 
and war among men of different creeds and beliefs. 
This irrational and ignorant opposition to the rational 
and healthful progress of humanity has been personified 
in Revelations, chapter xx., under the likeness of a 
dragon^ which is the Devil, or Do-evil^ and Satanas^ 
which means opposition, or irrational and unjust hatred 
and opposition to all proper growth and progress in 
human life. 

It is the misguidance of mankind by many of those 
who have been appointed by Heaven to instruct, protect 
and guide them until they have attained unto a proper 

113 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

moral and mental status to guide and govern them- 
selves, when they will be called upon to surrender 
the autocracy and allow the people to govern them- 
selves. 

Fortunately, there be some of the rulers of the world 
who appear at least to understand this outworking 
of the divine law that destinates the life of the divine 
humanity, and are seeking to make them ready for the 
mighty changes that await them. A little hearty and 
appreciative opposition and restraint, to hold the people 
back until they are more advanced and better prepared 
to assume all the prerogatives of self-government, may 
not be amiss for a time yet. 

But the inevitable eternal destinies of the great 
family of man are too palpable and manifest to be 
misunderstood. It would be far better for the people 
and for their rulers that the latter shall seek to pro- 
mote rather than to oppose this political and spiritual 
accouchment of the world's peoples into self-governing 
nations, that is now so swiftly progressing under the 
leadership of Heaven. 

What a seeming pity it is there are not a few more 
Dom Pedros in the world to help the people make 
themselves ready for their transition out of the old 
order of things into the new — the order of the *'new 
heavens and the new earth," only making such and 
so much apparent opposition to the revolution by which 
the people assumed the reins of the government as to 
appease his friends and family, who were opposed to 
his beneficent schemes for helping his people into self- 
rule by means of wise and judicious measures for their 
true growth and progress. It may be possible that 
Europe has at least one ruler. Emperor William of 
Germany, who has already accomplished a vast work 
for the advancement of his people, with what ulterior 
motives it is difficult to say, perhaps — whether for the 
sole purpose of conciliating the people into an endorse- 
ment of his dynasty for all time, or to educate them 
into an intelligent perception of the rights, duties and 
obligations of self-government with the intent to hand 

114 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

it over to them as soon as he believes them fully pre- 
pared for it. 

It is probably nothing more than justice to assume 
that the great Emperor — for great he certainly is — 
has been actuated by the wiser and nobler of the two 
alternatives. 

If our supposition be the true one — ^if he is con- 
ducting a campaign of education for his people with 
the intent and purpose of turning over the government 
into their hands by peaceful and voluntary revolution, 
it will indeed be a glorious act of self-abnegation — one 
that will place him in the very highest role among 
the rulers of earth and will endear him to the nations 
and peoples of the world for all coming time. 



AN IMPORTANT LAW OF PROGRESSION IN 

SPIRIT LIFE. 

A far-reaching and very important law of spirit life 
is the one which sends the spirit back to earth life to 
obtain certain material forces from those still resident 
in the flesh, to aid him in the proper rebuilding of his 
own spirit body, in such cases as those who, while they 
were living in the flesh, lived very bad lives, and hence, 
when they entered spirit life, are *'sick" spirits, and 
require to be treated for their maladies of earth life- 
For all things that affect the body affect the mind, or 
spirit body, also, with this difference, however, that 
the ailments which the material body (soma) impresses 
upon the spiritual body (psyche) are more abiding 
than are those made by the spirit body upon its ma- 
terial companion, which is dissolved at death. For 
such is the law. 

Since the establishment of hospitals in spirit life 
for the treatment of the ailments which the spirit man 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

incurred while a resident of earth life, vast numbers 
of the insane and of others who are afflicted with the 
"ills that man is heir to" are being treated, and with 
wonderful success. 

And the treatment of these maladies originating in 
earth life are not confined to such only as are passing 
into spirit life at the present time, but untold thou- 
sands of those who entered it ages ago are also the 
subjects of this benign law of treatment. For this is 
the ''Judgment Day," when even those *'who are in 
their graves — spiritual — shall hear the voice of the 
Son, and they that hear shall live." This is also the 
era or ''times of the restitution of all things," when 
those who were the leaders and the rulers of mankind 
and should have been their teachers and helpers, to 
lead them to a higher life, became their oppressors, 
rather, and failed to discharge their duties to the 
humbler classes when in this life — these great ones — 
all, indeed, who failed to perform their duties to the 
humbler classes in return for the services and uses 
wrought by them for those placed over them by the 
higher powers — these mighty ones are descending by 
myriads, many of them into the very lowest dens of 
darkness, sorrow and despair, and are doing all they 
can to aid the noble philanthropists and sages in their 
blessed work of healing the sick of all times and 
conditions. 

Such is the law of compensation placed upon them 
by the higher powers and the higher law, and there 
is no longer any evasion of it. 

The material body of man is an organ of the spiritual 
man who lives within it as in a house of his own 
making, and fulfills a number of offices in the life of 
the individual. As already stated, it is a house or 
tenement in which for the time "he lives and moves 
and has his being." 

It also performs the office of a stomach for the uses 
of the spiritual man, wherein, aided by its correspond- 
ing organ in the spiritual body, he digests, elaborates 
and refines his foods, both temporal and spiritual, for 
both these needs and requirements of the spiritual man. 

ii6 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

From this laboratory, as from a common fountam, 
aided by appropriate machinery, the various foods thus 
prepared go forth into every part, nerve, cell and fiber 
of both the physical and the spiritual man, to refresh, 
rebuild and renew him in every portion of his being, 
though the foods which the spiritual man selects, dis- 
tributes and formulates unto itself for the proper re- 
newal of its own tissues, are of a less gross form and 
degree than are those foods and other forces which 
the more animal man makes use of to renew and re- 
build its own proper structure. 

These foods and other forms of the life forces that 
man thus receives from the raw materials supplied 
by nature come from the heights and depths of uni- 
versal life, both from the spiritual and the material 
worlds, and are superintended, directed and moved 
by the creative intelligences in the evolution of all 
beings, both small and great, material and spiritual. 

From these foods thus appropriated from the vast 
storehouse of nature, man not only supplies his own 
and hourly needs in greatest measure, but from these 
m.anifold foods which man thus elaborates and refines 
within the crucible of his own being. But in their more 
subtle, refined and spiritual forms he imparts them to 
all who come within the sphere and scope of his own 
being. "I am the living bread that came down from 
heaven: if any man eat of this bread, he shall live 
forever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, 
which I will give for the life of the world." 

''1 am that Bread of Life.'' 'This is the Bread that 
cometh down from Heaven that a man may eat thereof 
and not die." 

"The Jews therefore strove among themselves say- 
ing: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" 

"Jesus said unto them verily, verily I say unto you, 
except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and 
drink his blood, ye have no life in you. Who so 
eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood, hath eternal 
life and I will raise him up at the last day. For my 
flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He 

117 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth 
in me and / in him." 

'*And the man said: The woman which thou gavest 
to be with me, she gave me of the fruit of the tree and 
I did eat." In all matters that concern the Intelligence 
of man woman represents 'Ture Reason" or direct and 
immediate perception, while man (as a rule) creeping 
to all his conclusions by a comparatively slow process 
of reasoning, represents the ''Rational understanding'' 
as defined by the Metaphysician Emanuel Kant. 

Hence it is that the womanly or femenoid Intelli- 
gence is the first to perceive great primal truths — first 
''eats" of them and afterwards hands them over to the 
man, or masculine intellect, and ''he did eat." 

'"For there went virtue out of him and healed them 
all." This ''Virtue" or dunamis, that in this way went 
out of him and healed so many of the multitudes that 
came for the purpose of being healed of their diseases 
were his personal loves, affections, magnetisms and 
other potent foods which he imparted to all who 
were in mental and spiritual touch and harmony with 
him. 

"For my flesh is meat indeed and my blood — or love 
— is drink indeed." 

Not only did the beloved Christ possess this mar- 
vellous power or ''gift," but so also did Paul and 
Peter, who, for e:5cample, raised the dead Dorcas to 
life. In truth it is a "gift" possessed by all healers in 
every age, as Jesus himself prophesied would take 
place with all who believed in Him and in His meth- 
ods and means of healing. 

"If any man believe in me the works that I do shall 
He do also and greater works shall he do because I ^o 
to the Father." 

And again: "And these signs shall follow them 
that believe. In my name shall they cast out Devil^>: 
they shall speak with new tongties : 

* >!c :)€ 5}j H: * 

"They shall lay their hands on the sick and they 
shall recover." 

All of which predictions of the beloved Master have 

ii8 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

been literally and abundantly fulfilled in modern times 
both among Christian Scientists, Spiritualists, and 
many others of the ''Mind Cure" persuasion. 

But to return. A time will come, as soon or late it 
comes to all, when the material body with all its mani- 
fold organs, functions and potencies must be put aside. 

It has fulfilled the full round of its wondrous being, 
as Nature intended, if its ''allotted" time has not been 
cut short by accident, disease, or some other of the 
thousand and one causes that produce premature death. 
The spirit man passes on into the realm of Spirit Life. 

We see him no more for the simple reason that like 
the electro-motor he is of too fine materials to be cog- 
nizable by the gross unspiritual five senses of this 
"muddy vesture of decay that doth so grossly close 
us in." With the putting aside of the material organ- 
ism he also laid aside the material laboratory or stom- 
ach wherewith he had for long years with the assist- 
ance and co-operation of its correspondenting spiritual 
stomach, prepared the foods for his subsistence and 
well being. 

Henceforth he will be obliged to depend upon the 
digestive and the elaborative organs of the spiritual 
body alone for the means to prepare the foods for his 
daily and hourly uses and enjoyments in the spirit 
world. If the spiritual house which he built up during 
his sojourn in the flesh be of so high, pure and endur- 
ing character that it shall require no radical changes 
to be made in it afterward to adapt him to life in the 
spirit world, all is well with him. 

He has fulfilled the law of his own being and is at 
peace within himself and with God's great Universe 
everywhere. 

But if, during his lifetime in the world, he has been 
building up a diseased body both of the material and 
spiritual kinds, he has both sub-consciously and uncon- 
sciously been slowly drifting into what for a better 
name we term "the Hells" both of a material and 
spiritual character, which in some of their leading 
aspects will return to him in a more aggravated form 
than in this life of the flesh. 

119 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

And now since he has not any longer tjie material 
body with all its important organs and functions to 
act in concert with those of the spirit body and thus to 
assist it in the elaboration of his foods, not only such 
as are designed for ordinary uses, but more espe- 
cially those of another and quite a different sort; viz., 
such as are intended to act as alteratives — as we in this 
life are in the habit of terming them — and which he 
must have and use to effect these important radical 
changes which he must undergo in order to get rid 
of the diseased conditions which he lived into while in 
earth life, — ^by those spiritual transformations that 
will restore it to healthful conditions. 

This is the great difficulty that hitherto has con- 
fronted man upon his entrance into Spirit life, — a dif- 
ficulty arising from his dense ignorance of the laws 
that regulate his own spiritual being. This was the 
vast problem concerning the life of man that confront- 
ed Swedenborg and his teachers in spirit life, chief 
among whom was St. Augustine, who was a fatalist 
of the most rigid character and from whom Sweden- 
borg imbibed that terrible system of pessimistic the- 
ology that he has given to the world. 

Both St. Augustine and Swedenborg were very 
great and very learned men, especially the latter. Both 
of them were voluminous writers. But St. Augustine 
has done more to shape the religious opinions of man- 
kind and to impress upon them their cruel and utterly 
relentless character than all the primitive church 
Fathers put together. 

The human mind can contemplate only with aston- 
ishment, the utter '^sang froid" with which Swedenborg 
inverts the character of the Divine Being — "Our 
Father who art in the Heavens," — ^as delineated by the 
beloved Christ — into the very strange and unutterable 
Being that still exists in some of the creeds of to-day, 
that has no counterpart in reason, science, philosophy 
or even in any of the Mythologies that exist among 
men of the most barbarous tribes — a doctrine and a 
character that if true and could be realized in its 

120 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

enormity would dethrone the very foundations pf 
human reason itself. 

But as we have shown elsewhere, the Hells of Spirit 
life as defined in the creeds are couched in intensely 
symbolic language, which when it is taken in a literal 
sense, as the churches have done in the past ages to 
present times, justifies all the horrors of which we 
have spoken. But v/hen used in a spiritual sense are 
rational, just and true, and places men in perfect align- 
ment and harmony with universal law, and when fully 
explained and understood in all its bearings, as it soon 
will be by the more adult spiritual man, will no longer 
exist as a terror and a stumbling block to human 
reason. But on the contrary will be a source of great 
joy, peace and divine satisfaction to every soul of man. 

It was this theological nodus that confronted Swed- 
enborg at the outset of his scriptural studies and in- 
stead of taking the true spiritual sense of the word, 
he fell into the literal sense of it as Augustine and 
others of the Church Fathers had done before him, 
and his intercourse with these Fathers in spirit life 
had only served to impress it still more deeply upon 
his own mind as the true spiritual sense of the word, — 
at least in many cases where the philosophical or 
Theosophical Sense should have been made use of. 

Hence, he not only put aside the plainest teachings 
of the Master upon this subject, both while still in the 
flesh and also after his Ascension when "he went and 
preached to the spirits in prison," and in doing so he 
violated the plainest dictates of reason and humanity, 
the teachings of Science and Philosophy, both physical 
and psychical and lastly the Word itself, which as an 
authoritative message to mankind must of necessity 
be in full accord and harmony with the Bible as traced 
everywhere in the great volume of Nature by the 
finger of the Almighty, but also upon the living tablets 
of the human soul ! 

But all things take their place upon this 'Vast scene 
of man" in all due order, time and place. A new era 
has at last dawned upon both spirit world and human 
world. It is the era of real human progress. It is the 

121 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

establishment of a newer, higher and nobler standard 
for the ''Judgment of mankind. 

''And I saw the dead, small and great, stand before 
God, and the Books were opened — viz., "Old Theo- 
logy" — which is the very imperfect and in many re- 
spects very false estimate placed upon the character 
of man, by his religious teachers in old theology ; also 
the very crude and in so many respects very false esti- 
mate placed upon the true character of mankind by 
our works upon civil, social and political law. 

"And another book was opened which is the Book 
of Life and the dead were judged from the things 
written in the books." 

The first two books contain the very imperfect and 
false estimates or '']vidgmtnis'' placed by theology 
upon humanity, and are still retained as an important 
element of the ''general judgmenf now taking place, 
because true and vital in many of their leading feat- 
ures, and which when they are modified by the higher 
and more perfect Judgments of the marvellous sciences 
of the present age, will constitute Judgment in its high- 
est and most perfect form. 

And this is the "Book of Life." It is Science, true 
Religion, Psychology, Philosophy, Philanthropy and 
every other science that elucidates and ennobles the 
true character of human kind, as applied to the office of 
assigning to man his true character, first as an individ- 
ual and second as to his rank and place in the Univer- 
sal Heavens. 

We now return more directly to the law concerned 
in healing in its metaphysiological relations to the 
treatment and the cure of spiritual and other diseases, 
and as it relates to both the healer and his patient. 

Let us inquire what it is that takes place in the 
sick when they are healed by the "laying on of hands" 
as did Jesus and His disciples when they were in the 
world, and has since been done by many healers of the 
present time. There is a simple transfusion of the 
healthy ''Blood" of the healer into every part and 
organ of the sick person, whereby he is restored to 
health. The living forces of the healer, — ^the loves, 

. 122 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

affections, and other personal magnetisms enter into 
every fiber, nerve and atom of the body of the sick 
person, and repelling the disease establish health in its^ 
place. The entire physical man has undergone a radi- 
cal transformation. 

But v^hen the sick man has put aside his material 
body and has entered the spiritual world, the same law 
obtains — follows him thither, but operates now unde^ 
somewhat different conditions. In other words he has 
not any longer the aid of the material body to assist 
him in the evolution of those forces which he requires 
to co-operate with the spiritual forces within him in 
expelling the diseases which he took into him by a bad 
life in the flesh. 

And yet he will be obliged to have these co-operative 
forces for the repulsion of the diseases of the spiritual 
body, — forces generated in the material body, as Swed- 
enborg has stated in N. 480 in his ''Heaven and Hell/' 
But while Swedenbory could see no way out of this 
difficulty yet there is one now made manifest by the 
light thrown upon these vexing questions of the mind 
by the more advanced conditions of modern Science. 
Philosophy and a true Theosophy, which were not 
much known to Swedenborg and the age in which he 
lived. 

These co-operative forces originating in the material 
body, which the sick m.an of spirit life can no longer 
obtain from his own physical organism, having cast 
it off from him at deaths he can still find an abundant 
supply in the bodies and souls of other people, and 
from such as still living in the form but in more 
healthful and normal conditions spiritually are far 
better adapted to his needs of health and recovery 
than any that could be derived from his own diseased 
material body were it still available for his uses. 

This divine source of healing is one of the greatest 
of the prerogatives of the divine social man and is 
much more potent now in the hospitals of the spiritual 
world and applies to a vastiv wider range of diseases 
there than here. In truth it applies there to every form 
of disease and all diseases there become more amenable 

123 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

to treatment since the sinner has got rid of his old sick 
body with its diseases and its enticing passions and 
appetites, and does not encounter so much opposition 
from them as when subject to them in the Hfe of the 
flesh. 

It is this somewhat occult law discovered and de- 
monstrated by the old Greek philosopher and scientist, 
Anaxagoras, "Father of Modern Science/' as he is 
sometimes called to-day. It is this occult law or 
force that brings millions of human beings after their 
entrance into spirit life back to their former terrestrial 
habitats to become the source of the manifold cranks 
and other insane people that fill insane asylums, jails 
and penetentiaries that abound in our land. 

Anaxagoras, upon his entrance into spirit life, like 
the wise Socrates, chose to remain in the lower spheres 
among the people of all ranks, classes and conditions, 
the better to enable him (them) to study their needs 
and requirements, and to help them where they re- 
quired help. 

Anaxagoras discovered, from long and careful ob- 
servation among the lower and other classes, that such 
as chose to remain in terrestrial conditions, not seek- 
ing to escape the evils incurred by remaining in the 
lower spheres by a too early ascent into the higher. He 
discovered that such as' preferred to remain in touch 
with the earth and earthly influences, and mingled 
freely with all classes, and especially with the 
people of the world, who, still in full and active pos- 
session of their earthly bodies, could supply them with 
those terrestrial-spiritual forces and foods which they 
required both to sanitate and to rebuild their diseased 
spirit bodies, that these by long subjecting themselves 
to terrestrial influences became gradually improved in 
their personal and sanitary conditions. Like Anteus, 
the Son of Ge, or Earth, who wrestled with Hercules, 
they became stronger and better by coming into and re- 
maining in touch with dear old Mother Earth and her 
benign and salutary influences. 

By some to us as yet unknown and mysterious im- 
pulse, the dog when bitten by a poisonous serpent, is 

124 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

said to retire by himself where he is not likely to be 
disturbed and buries the bitten part in the earth and 
lets it remain for days perhaps subject to its sanitive 
potencies. 

Physicians have made the important discovery that 
the earth poultice is one of the very best applications 
that can be made to wounds and other lesions of the 
body of certain classes or kinds. 

These forms of sanitation would likely be more pop- 
ular were it not for the name and some degree of in- 
convenience that attach to them. 

But man has adopted the sand bath and the mud 
bath, and it remains to be seen if both of them may not 
become more popular as time passes. Certain it is 
that terrestrial and semi-terrestrial influences and po- 
tencies play a wonderful part in the sanitary means 
and methods employed by the angels in the treatment 
and cure of vast numbers of the diseases that afflict 
mankind in the lower spheres of spirit life, according 
to their word. 



PRE-EXISTENCE. 



One morn beside the hedgerow 'neath the trees- 

The lofty Eucalyptus — I espied 
A glorious *Psyche wing the early breeze, 

Dancing and prancing on the morning tide. 

But yesterday a dull, unsightly worm 

Crawling and sprawling on maternal breast — 

To-day a thing of life, a glorious form 

Cleaving the air with wondrous life and zest. 



*The large golden lyre-winged butterfly. The Greeks 
had but one word for Soul and for the Butterfly, viz.: 
Psyche, which they regarded as the true symbol of the 
soul of man in all its beautiful metamorphoses. The in- 
cident took place just as I have related it. 

125 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

With joy I hailed it and in converse free. 

"Oh, glorious sprite/' said I, "whence comest 
thou here? 
From Sunland or from some more far country 

Where Angels dwell in some celestial sphere ?" 

"Did '^Eos, Painter of the Dawn, portray 

Those rainbow tints upon thy dainty wing, 

Or did Apollo with his lyre for aye 

Impart such power that as they soar they sing?" 

My only answer was a higher flight, 

Cleaving the air as if in perfect scorn 
Of earth and all that dwell within its light 

And all who to its miseries are born. 

"Spirit of life and beauty," then cried I, 

"Canst thou not answer one who though earth's 
pawn 

Like thee hath spanned the past eternity — 
Cotemporary of Creation's dawn? 

"I am not all unworthy, but have sought 
To dwell in harmony with all human kind ; 

Nor these alone, but in my inmost thought 

Have loved all meaner things with fervent mind. 

"Say, canst thou tell me aught of former life, 

Of blest Nirvana or of Devachan, 
Where once we dwelt so free from pain and strife 
Which here so blurs the Hf e of gods and men ? 

"Don't tell me you forget ; it can't be true ! 

In thy dear brightness thou recallest well 
The long, bright halcyon days when I and you 

In those high spheres knew naught of earth's dark 
spell. 



* Eos means Dawn. 

126 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

"Bring me some token of that blessed time 

When Hfe was one long dream of conscious bliss 

Where oft we winged those heavenly airs sublime 
Unconscious of the cares and tears of this. 

''Bright messenger of the dawn, so free, 

When yon bright orb spread his first glorious 
beams — 

When sang the stars in all their youthful glee — 
Repeat to me what were thy morning dreams! 

"Oh, say not that thou knowest naught of this, 
Since thou art Psyche, free from earthly forms, 

While I, still prisoned in this earth-shell, seek release 
To find again the sun that ever warms. 

"Still art thou dumb ! Ah, couldst thou say thy say 
How it would shame professors of the college 

Who are delving in the mud of earth for aye 
To find the rootlets of the 'tree of knowledge !' 

"But wisdom ofttimes is most eloquent 

When it sits dumb before the word it brings ! 

Words have no power to tell the message sent, 
And what the sage can't say the poet sings. 

"Fain would I learn if thou canst tell me now 
The wondrous mysteries of Re-incarnation? 

'Twould be a marvellous story as I trow 
And dim the glories of the first creation ! 

"Reincarnation is Creation's Law — 
By it the Monad doth ascend to man, 

Man to the angel, angel to the God 
Qne universal and consistent plan. 

"Say, wast thou present when our dear old eartK 

First out of Chaos into Cosmos came? 
Is Vega or Arcturus prior of birth ? 

Lord Sirius or our own great God of jBiame.2 

127 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

"Wast thou a witness when the morning stars 
Together sang, the new-born universe? 

Teach me that song, if love of truth inspires, 
I fain would place it in my humble verse. 

"Perchance, but just now freed, thou canst not say, 
Since Time hath rule in all sublunar things ; 

If so, ril patient wait another day 

And greet thee when the bird of morning sings. 

"Still art thou Sphynx? Perchance it may be wrong 
To filch the secret story of Creation; 

Perhaps I do but push my quest too strong, 
And ought to wait till the next decarnation. 

"But that's of little use to Fleshly men 

Who hunger for some freshly inspired pages 

Who have no wish to get beyond their ken, 
But famish on the moldy crusts of ages! 

"Still art thou mute? Perchance it is the best 
That life's past glories visit not these eyes, 

That Heaven in mercy vexeth not our rest 
With visions of the splendors of, the skies ! 

"Yet let me thank thee for the priceless Word, 
The message all unconscious thou has brought, 

Divinest Psyche, Angel of the Lord, 
Which in his higher wisdom he hath wrought/^ 



THE SPIRITUAL UNIVERSE. 

The solar-planetary systems that fill all space in in- 
finite numbers are mizo-cosms; and individual worlds 
are but mega-cosms in this vast infinite, magnificent 
and infinitely glorious panorama of the worlds and 

128 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

their sublime inter-planetary relations and uses, which 
they sustain to each other in the life of all things. 

The universes, philosophically and spiritually con- 
sidered, are nerved, muscled, ligamented throughout, 
the only portions that we can behold with our natural 
eyes being the osseous system, or the material worlds, 
which form the bases of the various world systems — 
the ''footstools'' of the Gods {''Heaven is my throne' 
The Earth is my footstool," saith Jehovah. 

These marvellous parallelisms, analogies and corre- 
spondences in the constitution of all things are not 
only wonderful, unutterably glorious, but they are won- 
derfully helpful to the higher mtelligences in their 
work of teaching the laws, or modes of action and of 
being of the various universes to the planetary boys 
and men ! They form an easy line of ascent from par- 
ticulars and details and into generals and universals. 

They present the laws to the infant as well as the 
more adult spiritual man of the lower worlds in an in- 
finite panorama, beautiful object lessons that carry for- 
ward and upward the young spiritual mind in a won- 
derful way ! 

As soon as man has acquired sufficient strength and 
clearness of vision to enable him to put aside his Earth 
goggles, which were given him by the Creator to enable 
him to more easily endure the too dazzling rays of the 
great intense spiritual sun, he will open his spiritual 
eyes upon a spiritual universe so magnificently and sub- 
limely glorious that his soul will be filled with transport 
at the wondrous scene that will greet his astonished 
sight. 

In the evolution of this wonderful subject we have 
to consider man in his social and spiritual relations to 
his kind. In the study of these very important rela- 
tions we are much aided by the Master in some of the 
juvenile lessons in spiritual things which he gave to his 
disciples and to the world in his discourses to them 
not long before his crucifixion. "Jesus said unto them. 
Verily I say unto you, except ye eat the flesh of the 
Son of Man, ye have no life in you. Whoso eateth 

129 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

my flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life : and 
I will raise him up at the last day'' . . . 

*'He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood 
dwelleth in me and I in him/^ 

Christ in thus informing the Jews, including his own 
disciples, that he was the ''bread that came down, yea 
that Cometh down from heaven," struck a vast and 
vital and eternal principle that relates and governs all 
the world. Spiritual, natural, material, human — all of 
them — a divine focal principle that concerns all men, 
with this difference concerning Jesus, that he was (is) 
a very advanced spirit with many re-incarnations be- 
hind him, and for that reason had been chosen by the 
Fatherhood as a special minister plenipotentiary clothed 
with full powers as teacher and exemplar, to become 
the most central force about which would focalize and 
crystalize the forces of civilization itself. 

The nature of these forces of which the Master 
speaks are not difficult to comprehend perhaps if one 
can put off his church prejudices and other precon- 
ceptions too old for his eyes and blur the vision. 

"And virtue went out of him and healed them all." 
It was by means of this personal divine ''virtue'' that 
Christ went forth and with his mighty will power to 
heal the multitudes of the sick that came to him foi| 
healing. It also enabled Paul and Peter to raise the 
dead as Christ had done, as we have elsewhere seen in 
another chapter, and which has also enabled modern 
healers to perform similar wonderful works. 

Yes, love is the ''blood" of the spiritual man and 
"Hesh" IS the "bread" of the spiritual man to which 
Jesus makes allusion in his discourse to the Jews (John 
vi, 51-58). They form the personal magnetisms of 
all men according to their degree and kind — ^their 
growth and advancement in spiritual things. "For my 
flesh is meat indeed and my blood is drink indeed." 
No one who can comprehend a tithe even of the vast 
and sublime truths — the spiritual pearls of thought to 
which the beloved one gave utterance during his earth- 
ly ministrations, but will admit that the "bread" and 
the "blood" that were elaborated in his spiritual sys- 

130 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

tern were standard hi^h, and sufficiently true, pure and 
commanding to modify and transform the other great 
religions of the world and to create a religion broad 
enough and big enough to supply ample standing room 
and acting room for every ''Son of man/' and a spir- 
itual cuisine large enough and free enough to allow 
every son of God to choose his own foods without let, 
hindrance or dictation from any source whatsoever. 

Our personal prescription of the foods and drinks of 
others grows too often and to much out of our own 
personal experiences and necessities ; and while it may 
be perfectly harmless, grateful and wholesome for us, 
may be deleterious to others. This precious conserva- 
tive law extends to all the worlds, both material and 
spiritual, but is more potent in the latter than in the 
former, and more potent and active as one ascends 
from lower into higher degrees of the spiritual and 
celestial life of man. Hence the severity with which 
Jesus spoke of the course pursued by the Scribes and 
Pharisees and all others who ^'compass sea and land 
to make a single proselyte, who, when he is made, be- 
comes twofold more a child of hell than themselves." 
For by so doing they do not subjugate his errors but 
his honesty, and turn him over to the devil of evil ways 
and practices, for the eternal God can do nothing for 
a rascal — can build very little that is great or good 
upon a rogue. 

But we must consider these divine, spiritual, organic 
principles in a still higher light. Says the man Jesus: 
"He that eatet-h my flesh and drinketh my blood dwell- 
eth in me and I in him!' It is a vital principle extend- 
ing to and intimately relating to all cognate souls 
everywhere in all worlds. It is the law and the force 
that unites and determines the destinies of all souls, 
and more especially those which concern the relations 
of the true man and true woman. The spiritual plane- 
tary man or mega-cosm of our little world is made up 
of an almost infinity of spiritual beings, men and wo- 
men, each of whom performs some function or use 
greater or less in the "divine humanity" or planetary 
man. These relationships do not give themselves ex- 

131 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

pression in mere words and symbolisms. But chiefly 
in the form of most beautiful nerves and ligaments that 
unite the wise and the good — indeed they are beautiful 
or ugly according to the character of those united. 

The spiritual vision of the writer was at one time 
sufficiently opened to witness an example of this won- 
derful relation between two persons, one of whom was 
a healer, A broad, bright, beautiful golden band ap- 
peared to come forth from the region of the solar 
plexus of the physician and to extend across the inter- 
lying space — some thirty feet or more distant — and 
to enter the body of the patient in the corresponding 
region. One of the things connected with the beautiful 
vision was the fact that this spiritual golden band, that, 
though broad, seemed to be no heavier than the lightest 
gossamer, appeared to have material weight as it hung 
suspended between the two persons in a long, light 
curve downwards toward the earth or floor. 

This example, if we consider it attentively, and with- 
out prejudice, may serve to explain much that has 
hitherto been regarded as inexplicable in the occult or 
spiritual life of man. The writer will give an example 
in point. 

He was well acquainted with an intelligent physician 
who had two brothers that were twins. If one of these 
were taken ill in any way, the other, though living 
hundreds of miles away, was invariably attacked in the 
same way. This marvellous divine unity under spirit- 
ual conditions extends to the whole body of the divine 
humanity in greater or less degree and potencies, and 
the more spiritually minded and intelligent one may be 
the more he is lifted up to a plane where he becomes 
conscious of its truth. 

These spiritual foods of which Christ speaks not 
only relate all souls to him who love him, and in a very 
vital way as he has stated, but they are like and similar 
to those which we are considering in connection with 
the entire body of the spiritual planetary man. These 
sublime forces are not only the nerves and the liga- 
ments that unite and bind in one all the elements of the 
Divine Man; they are also a great part of the goods 

133 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

upon which he subsists both physically and spiritually. 
Persons have been known to subsist for years upon the 
spiritual forces which they draw from their friends 
around them in bodily presence and from those im- 
parted to them by the Angelic Societies in the spiritual 
world to which they are affinitively related while still 
in this life. 

''I have meat to eat that ye know not of," said Jesus 
to his disciples on a certain occasion. 

As foods for both the material and the spiritual 
man these personal forces that are derived from the 
material worlds and their atmospheres and from the 
spiritual worlds and their atmospheres, and are after- 
ward digested, elaborated, refined and eaten, both by 
the man himself, but chiefly by his friends — these are 
the chief attractions and foods that drew man and 
woman together in the social, spiritual and conjugal 
relations, and are the causes and influences that render 
all these relations so delightful and intoxicating to 
human souls. They eat one another, but functionally 
and not in any harmful, but beneficent way — as stated 
by the beloved Christ. 'Tor my flesh is meat indeed 
and my blood is drink indeed." 'Whoso eateth my 
flesh and drinketh my blood hath eternal life." Yes, 
it is by virtue of the fact that individual man is nerved, 
ligamented and co-muscled even with his fellow and 
through him with every other part of the Divine Hu- 
manity, and is thus also fed from its divine living 
fountains of life universal, that he becomes eternalized 
and lives ultimately among and by the Immortals. 

The hand, the finger, the foot — every cell of the 
many millions that form the man — derive their ex- 
istence, subsistence and base of life from these divine, 
precious and holy relations with other souls. "Thanks 
to the human heart by which we live." But that 
which doth relate man most potently to the infinite 
life and accomplishes most to eternize and infinitize 
the whole life of man, are the relations he sustains, and 
ever must sustain, to the infinite creative sphere which 
constitute the brain, or the positive pole of the holy 
ODivine Humanity. Cut ofif the hand or finger of a man 

133 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and it is immediately dead. And the forces of sur- 
rounding life at once begin the work of disintegration 
and death. 

In like manner if man separates himself too far from 
the vital currents that are forever flowing forth from 
the living Brain of the Divine Being to impart life, 
health and motion to all his worlds and universes, he 
also perishes, and is found no more in the ranks of 
living men and women. And this he can do if he so 
desires. 

Yes, man so far as his degree of advancement in 
spiritual things will admit, is totally related to all those 
societies in spirit life for which he has any very posi- 
tive attraction. 

For, as the human body is made up of an infinity of 
cells that are corelated and held together as one body, 
and is composed of manifold organs, functions and 
uses, as has been ^shown elsewhere, so likewise the 
spiritual worlds are made up of innumerable societies 
that correspond in their spiritual relations and uses 
to the organs, functions and services that are per- 
formed by the manifold membership of the human 
body. 

And this is true not only of the great universe it- 
self in all its compensatory relations with its worlds, 
systems and inferior or lower universes, but it extends 
all the way down to the terrestial worlds and all their 
containments, where are found the earliest involutions 
and incarnations of spiritual forms in material forms. 
For material forms are only the dress which spirit 
forms create and in which they array themselves, as 
the hand in the glove and the person in the suit or 
dress. This eternal outflow of the living forces of the 
solar spiritual have a compensatory inflow that come 
to them from the terrestrial worlds and all their con- 
tainments. The former or the solar spiritual outflow of 
the spiritual currents and forces of universal life and 
correspond to the systematic currents of the arterial 
blood in the human system and their outflow and cir- 
culation throughout every portion of the human body. 

The latter, or compensatory inflow of the spiritual 

134 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

eternal life forces of the universe correspond to the 
venous circulation of the blood and other fluids of the 
human system. For these are corresponding things 
of the Divine Being. 



CONCERNING SABBATHS. 

The word Sabbath means rest. The Jews originally 
in the time of Moses observed three forms of the Sab- 
batic idea or principle: 

First — The observance of every seventh day as a 
day of rest, which was designed more especially to 
give the laboring man a period of rest from all his 
ordinary physical labors, having for its object a two- 
fold purpose, viz., First, rest from all toil and business 
labors for the refreshment and restoration of the forces 
and functions of the entire material man ; and, Second, 
the culture, invigorating growth and progress of the 
spiritual man, and his advancement into the higher 
planes and degrees in the life of the spiritual universe, 
which is the present and ultimate goal whither tendeth 
all his just efforts and eternal destinies. 

It was a rest of every seventh day, and was an em- 
bodiment and an imitation of the lunar week day prin- 
ciple by which all animals and plants incubate and 
menstruate, and which if not properly incorporated 
into the culture of the Flora and the Fauna of man in 
the future as it hath not been in the past, hath been 
among the prolific and woful causes of the universal 
breeding of predatory microbes in man, animal and 
plant the world over. 

We are moving too fast. We must slow up a great 
deal or else the ugly consequences soon or late will 
result in moribund relations and a dying world. 

The Second form of the Sabbatic law, or principle, 
as prescribed by Jehovah and adopted by Moses, was a 
Sabbath of years — ^and made every seventh year a 

135 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

year of "rest to the land." *'Six years shalt thou sow 
thy field and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard 
and gather in the fruit thereof — but the seventh year 
shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, A Sabbath 
for the Lord; thou shalt neither sow thy field nor 
prune thy vineyard/' 

It was not only a year of 'Vest to the land,*' but also 
became a whole year of rest to man and maid of the 
toiling classes whose worn and weary bodies have be- 
come sick and faint, often insane, from the fearful 
burdens imposed upon them by their unholy and nn- 
brotherly brethren in the flesh. 

The almighty, all-wise Father of the great family of 
man hath unlocked the vast storehouse of labor-sav- 
ing machinery to the world to enable man to enjoy 
greater and more perfect season of rest and social, 
spiritual and material recreation from the harsh and 
grinding effects of labor upon the man of toil. But 
the greater portion of those who have the control of it. 
instead of applying it to the great, wise and noble uses 
for which it is designed by the eternal divine Provi- 
dence to subserve, viz. : to enable them to have the 
means and the leisure to cultivate their own nobler 
and better natures and their families and dependents, 
they are making use of these means which the ternal 
God hath given them to pile up vast mountains of the 
wealth of which they have robbed the people and im- 
posed upon them as vast burdens too intolerable to be 
borne. 

The third form of the Sabbatic law or principle is 
the year of the jubilee, of the -fiftieth year. This is the 
greatest and the most benign of all the laws ever 
hitherto devised for the nationalization of the land to 
prevent its m.onopoly by the rich and to prevent its 
alienation from the possession and uses of the people 
and their families. But government will — and that, 
too, ere long — assume eminent domain over all the 
national wealth of the world and will forevei hold them 
in trust for the uses and interests of the whole people, 
and will never more allow them to be alienated from 
the people in the future in any manner or degree 

136 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

whatsoever. In so doing the government will repre- 
sent the real proprietors of the land and other natural 
wealth of the world, and will hold it in trust in be- 
half of the whole people — for the present race of 
man. 

This is the greatest and the most benign of all the 
agrarian laws that have ever been devised for the 
nationalization of the land to prevent its monopoly 
by the rich and powerful, and its alienation from the 
possession and uses of the people. But when political 
government has become more perfect — when it has be- 
come a "government of the people, by the people, and 
for the people," there will come a time, and one not far 
hence, when all individual proprietary rights will re- 
vert to the central governments of the several peoples 
of the world to be held in trust for their highest in- 
terests and uses. 

By so doing, earthly governments will be made to 
represent more perfectly the real and original spiritual 
proprietors and will better carry out their plans and 
purposes in the proper disposition of the natural wealth 
of the world — to confer titles upon it. 

As soon, however, as well established popular gov- 
ernments have been created by intelligent and well 
ordered peoples, these governments will assume the 
control and trusteeship of all the public wealth m their 
several countries of the world, in the name and by the 
authority of the original proprietors, and in behalf of 
the whole people. For, say what we may to the 
contrary notwithstanding, the fact will remain that 
man as we know him here m the flesh is not the origi- 
nal creator and owner of the worlds and their vast 
containments of natural wealth — although he is at 
present making some very fine improvements upon 
the property. But that, as the Scripture teaches and 
the higher intelligences of the spiritual affirm, (the 
material worlds and their belongings) are the work 
of advanced men living in the spiritual world — which 
is nothing more or less, practically considered, than 
a reaffirmation of the statement of John in his gos- 
pel: — ''All things were made by Him — ^Jesus — and 

137 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

without him was not anything made that was made." 

But Jesus was nothing more nor less than a man, 
one of these advanced men who are the doers of the 
Work in the .higher departments of the labors of 
man in the spiritual worlds in proper connection and 
in relation with the material worlds. John was so 
deeply impressed at the wisdom and the power of 
these angelic men of the spiritual world that he fell 
down at his feet to worship the angel that showed 
these wonderful things. But is instantly rebuked by 
the angel: — "See thou do it not. I am thy fellow 
servant, and of thy brethern that have the testimony of 
Jesus : — Worship God." 

The prophet Daniel manifested a like spirit in the 
presence of these more advanced men in spirit life 
who could shut the mouths of lions, enable men to 
walk in the midst of the fiery furnace without the 
slightest injury done to clothing or person though 
heated to a very wonderful degree. 

In regard to the Sabbatic year as a year of rest 
both to the land and to people, it is by no means an 
improbability that w^en hum.an life has become more 
enlightened and advanced; has less of the tiger and 
more of the characteristics of the lamb; when ma- 
chinery has taken the ''burden from the shoulders 
of all men," and man has made the conquest of the 
air as well as sea and land, and no man requires to 
give more time to the social and the intellectual uses 
of his material man, it may be that he will require 
an occasional whole year of rest both for the uses 
of the land, but more especially in his own behalf, as 
a somewhat protracted period of rest and relaxation 
of the whole man in order to promote those com- 
pensatory processes in his physique that will maintain 
his system at par. Man is now just entering upon 
a period in his history in some respects the most re- 
markable by far of all the chapters in the past history 
of the race, written or unwritten. 

Like some ancient ruined castle that has been the 
home and safeguard of its people for many a mil- 
lennium of years but has at last become so delapidated 

138 .^^^. 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and contracted for its growing family as to compel the 
owner to remove it entirely to make room for the new 
and spacious palatial home that is to take its place, 
in like manner and for like reasons the old civilization 
which has been the home and the safeguard of the 
whole human family, lo, these thousands of years, 
is at last become so delapidated and destroyed by time 
and weather, so far outworn and outgrown its uses, 
that the wreckers are now already busy at their work 
of pulling down the ancient edifice to make ample 
room for the new. The next fifteen to twenty years, 
or more, perhaps, will be given by the Higher Powers 
to the destruction and removal of the wreckage of 
this ancient building and to prepare for the manifold 
generation that are to come. As it has been well said 
of it in the Bible, that grandest, noblest of all the 
books ever given to man by his teachers in spirit life : — 
"And I saw a new heavens — a new civilization — and a 
new earth, for the old heavens and the old earth were 
passed away and there was no more sea" — no more 
unhappy peoples in a state of perpetual unrest and 
agitation like the sea waves. 

To return to our Sabbatic year. The old Greeks 
and Romans set aside every fourth year as a year of 
mental and physical recreation and social enjoyment, 
basing their rebuilding of the whole man upon the 
animal plane chiefly though not entirely. With the 
new civilization that is soon destined under divine 
Providence to take the place of the old, both the 
mental and the material as well as the social and the 
spiritual man, should and likely will, receive a nearly, 
if not equal attention. For the chief object of society 
in the education of youth should be to form a system 
of educational training for them that shall tend to 
remove the eccentricities and inequalities of human 
life to an extent and degree sufficient to enable all 
classes to harmonize perfectly, but no farther. 

To go beyond that in our eflforts to educate is to 
interfere with the rights of the individual and inflict 
a serious injury upon him, as do all our sectarian and 
other partial systems for educating the young. 

139 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

The time is but little distant now when man shall 
be called to witness a wonderful scene taking place 
upon dear old mother earth. He will not only behold 
every sea, lake, river, ocean, white with the commercial 
fleets of all nations; the continents and large islands 
of the globe gridironed with railways and other roads ; 
all of them, both trains and fleets, bearing happy mill- 
ions daily to and from every quarter of the globe ; but, 
when he lifts his eyes to the heavens, he shall behold 
a new and more glorious spectacle. He will see the 
very heavens alive with the airships of the God men 
who have at last made the conquest of sea, sky and 
land, and now seem likely to scale the higher heavens 
to discover and capture the palaces of Jupiter and his 
gods. 

For the "whole boundless universe" is man's and 
neither man, God nor devil hath any right to withhold 
from him those higher knowledges upon which he 
*'lives, moves and hath his being." 

We are living too fast. We must moderate our 
pace as a people, or we shall ere many generations 
breed monkeys rather than men — slow down! 

The Sabbath, when it is properly observed and un- 
derstood, will be seen and recognized as a function of 
universal life and not created by planetry man or his 
laws. The birds incubate a certain number of weeks, 
and the higher animals — man and beast — both men- 
struate and gestate in a similar way and the law ex- 
tends itself even into the vegetable realm, and plants 
also menstruate in harmony with this universal law 
established by the Creator through the attractions 
and other influences of our lunar planet. 

We have seen the female eucalyptus nearly cover 
the ground beneath it with what appeared to be water, 
while that under the male trees was perfectly dry. 
Even the law that is subserved by planting at certain 
periods of the lunar influence, is a very important 
one, as those who test it by proper experiment will 
discover. We speak from experience. 

Let those laugh who will. Yes, the seventh day or 
Sabbath is an important function in all life, both ani- 

140 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

mai and plant, and this is especially so with man. 
If the rational be so perfectly conjoined with the 
spiritual the affectional and the natural understand- 
ings they form that wonderful feminine faculty 
that is properly termed "faith" and which is the most 
subtle, refined and penetrative of all the human facul- 
ties and which the great metaphysician Emanuel 
Kant characterized as the pure Reason, or ''der reinen 
vernubty 

This most important function in the intellectual life 
of man and of woman, but of which woman possesses 
by far the most, is, as we have already stated, the most 
active and farseeing in the whole range of the human 
faculties, though woman has the largest share. The 
great skeptic and materialist, however, the Hon. 
Robert G. Ingersoll, denounced it as a vile compound 
of bigotry and superstition. 

Paul has given the best definition, so far as it goes, 
when he characterized it as ''The evidence of things 
not seen,'' Yes, dim as the light has been from the 
density of the veil through which it comes to man, it 
has been through long ages the greatest source of light, 
hope and comfort to ignorant and erring man during 
his long period of germination and gestation in the 
heart of the spiritual earth. 



NO MISSING LINKS. 

In charting the great planet, earth, for the distri- 
bution of its manifold functions and forms of life, 
the Supreme Architect first mapped out the basic 
forces of civilization in the very structure of the 
living world itself, both in its geological and in its 
geographical conditions and elements for the evolu- 
tion of life upon it. 

It is this important fact that so intimately con- 
cerns the development of the floral and the faunal 

141 



MAN'S PLACE IN TflE KOSMOS. 

life-forms of the planet, that has misled the material- 
istic philosopher in studying the forces as well as 
the processes by which creative progress has been 
carried on. For every degree of longitude and lati- 
tude is not only a material idea, but also a spiritual 
one. In the distribution of the climates, the soils, 
the rocks, the waters, and the forms of the continents, 
they have all been arranged by the Creative Wis- 
doms in a way to co-operate with the cosmic world- 
building forces, to aid them in the evolution of all 
created life forms. In crossing the continent from 
the Mississippi Valley to the Pacific Coast region, 
one is struck with the transformations in form and 
color that have taken place in his old familiar friends 
— the robin, the dove, the squirrel and others of his 
former acquaintances, among b^th animals and 
plants. 

Originally the same, the Creative Intelligence 
found different climatic foods and forces, different 
tools to work with, and as creation delights in va- 
riety it has in many cases supplied us with vari- 
tones in place of monotones. They are pict^^es im- 
pressed upon the pages of the great Book of Nature 
by its Great Author. For all things bear the stamp 
of His intelligence and His energies expressed in 
harmonious and mathematical forms. 

This differentiating energy of the creative func- 
tions is not only displayed in a very remarkable 
manner in the evolution of the lower life forms of 
our world, but formulates itself in an even more 
characteristic way in the higher forms of the life of 
man. 

Take our own people as an example in point. It 
is possible for an expert in American biology to go 
into an assembly of a thousand persons of American 
birth and descent for several generations, all of them 
strangers to himself, and from every part of the 
Union, and determine the state in which each one of 
them was born and bred, and make few mistakes. 

Of a truth these local transformations, so marked 
in their character, are not due wholly to local causes, 

142 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

not yet to cosmic forces, but to Spiritual causes also 
in the incarnations from the Spiritual world. 

The various terrestrial life forms in turn supply, 
the bases for the incarnations that come from the 
various races, sub-races and arch-races of the An- 
gelic forms of Spirit Life. 

From the summits of existence to the lowest 
depths of the chain of being there are no "missing 
links/' save the imperfection of man's knowledge. 
Not by "insensible gradations" hath the Divine 
Architect wrought out the manifold life forms, in 
which "He lives and moves and hath His being.'* 
But in vast cycles and by leaps and bounds hath the 
creative processes been accomplished. 

Not by post-uterine means and methods, nor dur- 
ing extra-uterine states and conditions, save, as has 
been already stated, but by and during intra-uterine 
forms and modes of existence have those important 
transformations been effected that we term species, 
genera, etc. 

And this statement of the Divine law of creative, 
progressive evolution is in practical harmony with 
the views of Agassiz, Cuvier and Liebig — the great- 
est of the world's comparative anatomists and 
scientists. 

Says Prof. Agassiz: "All domesticated animals 
and cultivated plants are traceable to distant 
species.'* 

And the domesticated pigeons which supply so 
large a portion of the illustrations are, notwith- 
standing their great diversity under special treat- 
ment, no exception to the rule. The truth is our 
domesticated animals, with all their breeds and va- 
rieties, have never been traced back to anything but 
their own species. Nor have artificial varieties so 
far as we know failed to revert to the wild stock 
when left to themselves. 

As we have already seen in previous numbers 
Judea, Greece, Rome, India, have performed very 
important parts in the evolution of the literal forms 
of the Divine Word. And this they have done and 

143 i 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

do because as nations they represent the Divine 
Word in its various cosmic forms. India evolved 
the idea of the Brotherhood of Man, but upon class 
and caste lines. But these fraternal caste lines in-* 
eluded within them even the animal world beneath him. 

But to Judea was assigned the very important 
office of evolving the more perfect religion of Chris- 
tianity, whose central idea is the Divinity and the 
Divine Unity of all life. It is the Fatherhood of 
God and the Brotherhood of Man. 

These divinely grand conceptions of man and of 
his eternal relations to the Divine Being have hith- 
erto been little more to the world in practice than an 
ideality, a golden dream that has haunted man's 
imagination and inspired him with hope during the 
long dark ages that have elapsed since the man of 
sorrows. 

But the signs of the times are full of great prom- 
ise. The old civilization is swiftly approaching its 
end, and Socialism, the "New Heavens and the New 
Earth, wherein dwelleth Righteousness'* will shortly 
take its place. 

While all the nations are destined to sustain im- 
portant uses, and functions in the new world's civ- 
ilization — the Divine Cosmic Man — two of them will 
play very important parts in it. 

They are the two great national, or rather, racial 
movements of combined nationalities, we term 
Saxon and Slavon — destined to divide between them 
the empire of the world. 

To one of them has been committed the sublime 
task and office of evolving and imparting to man- 
kind the great institutions of Civil and Religious 
Liberty in their more perfect forms. 

Aside from these peoples who speak the English 
tongue, no nation has as yet shown itself capable of 
self-government, with universal tolerance of relig- 
ious opinions. 

The Slavon is the dual feminine complement of 
the Saxon, and will ultimately present to the world 
a vast concourse of peoples and nations whose in- 

144 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

stitutions have been wrought out on purely sociahs- 
tic Hnes. The twain constitute the head races of 
the world. 

They are symmetrical halves of the Divine Hu- 
manity, and in the evolution of its institutions they 
represent respectively Wisdom and Love. Each 
wing of the Divine Humanity has received its own 
special office and function in the affairs of mankind 
at the hands of the Divine Architect and will yet 
work out its manifest destiny in an integral and 
peaceful 4*elation to all other nations, empires and 
races in the bosom of the great holy, divine Univer- 
sal Republic. 

There is no need of heat, anger or interference 
between these two great movements on the planetary 
theater of time. Each one has its own "metes and 
bounds" assigned to it, geographical and other, 
which neither will be permitted by the higher 
powers to finally transcend. 

In harmonizing and otherwise preparing the great 
nationalities of the world for the higher civilization, 
the various world religions will still play a very impor- 
tant part. For religion is the basis of philosophy 
and of science and the central building-force of civ- 
ilization itself. 

Of all these religions Christianity is chief, and as 
such will supply to the other religions and their 
peoples those vital and indispensable principles of 
Spiritual and metaphysiological truth in which these 
other religions of the world are deficient. 

Meanwhile Christianity itself is undergoing a 
gradual but real transformation. Its more crude, 
literal, theological and mythological forms of truth 
are giving way under the benign rays of the great 
Sun of Scientific Truth, and its more occult and in- 
terior forms of truth are expanding under the intel- 
ligent scrutiny of more advanced thinkers, into uni- 
versal truths, principles and symbols. 

But the greatest, grandest, most vital of all these 
symbolical truths, as disclosed by the Master in his 
last, great address as delivered to His disciples, just 

145 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

before His death, and recorded in John's gospel, are 
yet to be more fully disclosed to the spiritual under- 
standing of man. 

They relate to the Social, Spiritual and Metaphy- 
sical forms of the Spiritual man which, like its 
cogener and similar, the material man is not a mere 
formula of words ingeniously arranged, but, like its 
material counterpart, is a tangible concrete entity of 
living forces. 

In the Social, Divine, Cosmic Man, or Megacosm, 
the individual man enters, by proper faith and works, 
and becomes vitally related therein to his fellow 
man by living forces as potent as those which relate 
the stars to each other in the realms of space. 

In no other form of the Living Word, ancient or 
modern, are these great occult — yet fast becoming 
manifest — truths concerning the metaphysiological 
forms of the spiritual body of man, taught with so 
much truth and distinctness, as they have been in the 
discourses, of the Christ, as recorded in John's gos- 
pel. The book occupies a distinct place in the liter- 
ature and philosophy of the world. 

It presents to the mind of man the sublimest pic- 
ture of the physiology of the Spiritual man and of 
his relations to the spiritual universe, to be found in 
the words of any teacher, ancient or modern. 
Through the spiritual organs and functions of the 
Cosmic or Social man, he inspires the interior life 
forces (atmospherea) of great Nature-God-digests 
and elaborates them within the cunning interiors of 
his own marvelous being, and afterward gives them 
to his fellow man for his eating — "loves and wis- 
doms," Spiritual magnetisms, "bread and wine/' 
"flesh and blood," "Except ye eat of the flesh of the 
son of man and drink his blood — the Cosmic or So- 
cial man — ye have no life in you/* 

But saith ignorance, "How can this man give us 
his flesh to eat?" 

Yes, mankind are beginning to understand these 
great interior facts in the life of the Spiritual man. 
He is becoming Gnostic. 

146 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 



THE FOODS OF MAN AND THE MOODS 

OF MAN. 

Part I. 

Homo est quid est, 

Mann ist vas er isst. 

The above proverb : "Man is what he eats," comes 
down to us through various sources, and from a 
venerable past. We quote it as it shows that the in- 
fluence exerted upon human character by the foods 
we consume are so manifest that reflecting men, 
everywhere, and in every age, recognize the fact. 
But, while it is a truth of great and vital importance 
in any aspect of the subject, it becomes an absolute 
and all potent verity only when we take into the 
account the entire range of the foods of man — ma- 
terial, mental, social, spiritual, celestial. 

This demand for so vast a variety in the foods 
which man employs in the creation of his material 
and spiritual vestments grows out of an imperative 
law of his most interior being; that is, an absolute 
and perfect vital, chemical and spiritual affinity and 
attraction eternally pre-established between man 
and his foods, man and his moods, and man and his 
bodies — temporal, spiritual and eternal. This mar- 
velous ego is forever at work, both consciously and 
unconsciously, weaving the warp and woof of his 
foods into tissues of his material and Celestial gar- 
ments, so perfectly that there is a definite and ab- 
solute correlation betwen the man and the foods he 
consumes, and the living vestures in which he 
clothes himself, and which he is ever obliged to 
maintain and renew against the disintegrating and 
destructive forces of the Universe within and with- 
out . 

Man not only selects his foods rationally, and m 
harmony with an interior and imperative law, so 

147 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

far as his limited cuisine will admit but these foods 
have a direct correspondence not only with his in- 
terior conditions and requirements, but are further- 
more in alignment with his differentiations of char- 
acter and of function in all his relations, both with 
the social and with the cosmic ego. But these foods, 
after they have passed through the chemical pro- 
cesses of digestive elaboration, are required to sub- 
mit to the elective and assimilative attractions and 
choice of the manifold organs and cellular differen- 
tiations that exist in so complex and marvelous an 
entity as in the human body. 

Both the animal and the spiritual man co-operate 
in this very complex function of the choice of foods 
and with most unerring certainty, where proper 
foods are supplied — partly by the dictate of reason, 
but chiefly as an interior response to the various 
cellular attractions for all those delicate and differ- 
entiated elements that form the real forces that en- 
ter, renew and perpetually rebuild the terrestro — 
spiritual body and all its modes of life in the flesh. 
There is not only an absolute and perfect corre- 
spondence betwen these interior forms and the foods 
by which man maintains them, but there is even a 
perfect correlation existing between the Foods of 
Man and the Moods of Man. 

Buckle, the eminent historian of Civilization, at- 
tached so vast an importance to the foods of a people, 
the occupations they follow, the air they breathe, 
their climates, habits of thought, etc., that he under- 
took to tell the end of a nation from the beginning. 
What are all these really but the unconscious foods 
of a people. This is strikingly true even were the 
philosopher to confine his observations upon man- 
kind from the time when man first emerged from the 
animal world beneath him — through the various an- 
thropoidal forms by which, guided by the Creative 
Wisdom, he made his ascent out of the vast matrix 
of Nature, in which the animal man was conceived, 
gestated and born into Time. 

If we ascend the mighty currents of his existence 

148 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and consider attentively the infinite and infinitely 
varied foods, forces and formulas of the life ele- 
ments — mineral, vegetable, animal and spiritual — by 
and through which the infinitely complex and com- 
pound being we term man has been elaborated and 
evolved in all its manifold parts, spiritual as well as 
material, we shall begin to comprehend the vastness, 
the magnificence, and the grandeur of the creative 
procedure; and also the marvelous adaptability of 
the manifold racial, sub-racial, national and even 
tribal elements of mankind, by which man was born 
into time and world, when directed by the Creative 
Wisdoms to work out the vast problems of the per- 
fect functionation, unitization and ultimate harmon- 
ization of all these seemingly antagonistic elements 
of the Divine Humanity into the Universal Repub- 
lic and the Eternal Brotherhood of Man. 

These marvelously differentiated and apparently 
hostile elements of mankind, as we find them in the 
world of to-day, are but the rough blocks which, 
when they have been touched and polished by the 
Divine finger, shall be put into the Living Temple, 
which will form the perfected Divine Humanity — 
"within which they shall neither hurt nor destroy in 
all my holy mountain!" For this is the ^'Stone" — 
Democracy or the rule of the people — ^that the Seer, 
Daniel saw in prophetic vision, "cut out of the 
mountain — Monarchic rule — without hands, that be- 
came a great mountain and filled the whole earth/' 
It is the Universal Republic ! 

Part H. 

It IS well recognized by ethnologists that people 
differ widely, not only in the original constitution 
which they derived from the lower animal world, 
but that their history, civilization, traits of charac- 
ter, as well as their moods and tenses vary greatly 
accordingly as they live in valleys, upon mountains, 
on islands, in the interior of vast continents, in for- 
ests, in hilly countries or in desert regions. And this 

149 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

IS what we should expect, as climate, soil, water, air, 
scenery, together with the peculiar vegetal and ani- 
mal productions of these various localities are potent 
foods in the formation of the human character, ma- 
terial and spiritual. 

In truth, every degree of longitude and latitude is 
an idea peculiar to itself, and impressed upon it by 
its own corresponding degrees of longitude and lati- 
tude in the spiritual world; and are important fac- 
tors in the revolution, not only of the human form 
and mentality, but they impress themselves with 
great energy upon the flora and the fauna of these 
localities. The plants and animals of this Coast not 
only vary greatly in form and character from the 
same or similar forms of life east of the Rockies, but 
they differ greatly in their habits also. 

If among the early historic races we look for the 
most independent, advanced and progressive types 
of mankind, we shall find them in the mountain 
regions of the world. 

Little Switzerland has evolved and maintained 
the republic in the midst of her eternal snows and 
mountain solitudes for hundreds of years before the 
birth of our own great republic. And little Andora, 
a much smaller people, has maintained her autonomy 
during long ages amid the Pyrenees, and against 
her potent neighbors, France and Spain. 

If, however, we wish to find races of mankind 
that are characterized by considerable immobility in 
progressive times, we have only to study the his- 
tory of China, Russia and other peoples inhabiting 
vast plain regions, where not only the popular mass, 
but the vastness of the country itself help men to 
lose their individuality and personal enterprise, and 
to depend chiefly upon the central ruling power for 
all progressive tendencies and impulses. 

Like the French people, the Slavonic races belong 
to the social and femenoid types of mankind— 
though with far less individuality than they — and 
they cultivate and feed upon the social-spiritual 
forces more than other people. ' 

* 150 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

Compare with these the wonderful energy, in- 
dividuality, mobility, and the intellectual progress of 
the Grecian peoples and the English-speaking na- 
tions. 

The Greeks, though but a very small people divided 
up among quite a number of petty states, during 
their time displayed an energy and activity, intel- 
lectual and spiritual, national and individual, that 
has been the astonishment and admiration of man- 
kind for more than twenty-five centuries. Glorious 
little Greece, with thy wondrously variegated scen- 
ery, thy lovely vales, thy lofty mountains, sparkling 
and transparent seas and lakes, thy beautiful island 
gems. 

'Where burning Sappho loved and sang;" 

thyself a most wondrous picture drawn by the finger 
of the Almighty; one of the triumph functions of 
the spiritual womb wherein was gestated the early 
forms of that civilization which, when it is perfected, 
will fill the earth with the divine glory. What other 
hand in all the world could have supplied so wonderful 
a variety and supply of those subtle and refined forces 
and foods which were required to build up a race of 
artists, poets, philosophers, orators, statesmen, scien- 
tists, and even warriors, as thou hast done? 

Thy geographical form upon the map is that of the 
human hand, for there is a correspondence more or 
less perfect of all things terrestrial and celestial, and 
justly so, in thy example, for thou art the land by 
which the creative intelligencies traced the first great 
lessons in art, science, philosophy, poetry, eloquence, 
democracy, patriotism, and in the science and arts of 
Homo-Culture. 

What country has supplied more glorious examples 
of patriotic devotion in defense of home, country, lib- 
erty and civilization than thou hast? 

Delightful Greece! Inspired by thy grand, lovely 
pictures, wrought in earth, sea, sky and stars, thy 
poets, philosophers, artists and scientists have dreamed 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

dreams that to-day have become living realities and the 
wonder and delight of mankind. Even thy beloved 
Socrates, in demonstrating the existence of the one 
God and his glorious attributes, drew his inspiration 
in great degree from thy glorious environments. 

Greece supplies us with an example of a purely 
vegetarian people — a fact that goes far toward an 
explanation of her intellectual glory and her political 
defeats as a people or peoples. Greece was the most 
purely intellectual and aesthetic people the world has 
produced. 

Vegetarian peoples produce the most active and 
powerful men of the race. When that important 
work has been accomplished of spiritualizing the 
racial soma, then will come the time of the second 
Anastasis, or resurrection, referred to by Christ, 
wherein the early and ignorant pioneer races and 
families of mankind shall, at the end of a thousand 
years — the briefest period within which they can 
properly return — in spirit life, have their opportun- 
ity granted for a new reincarnation in the flesh. 

This is the philosophic reason for the seeming 
cruel and prodigal waste of human life by flood, 
earthquake, disease, battle-field, and in other ways, 
by which whole families and races perish. 

It is "natural selection and the survival of the fit- 
test." Nature takes care only of those racial and 
other forms that tend most swiftly to the evolution 
of the perfected somatic body of the race, so that 
it shall become a perfect instrument for the accom- 
plishment of the needs and uses of the future in- 
carnations of mankind. Then will come the proper 
time of re-incarnation, not only for the pioneer races, 
many Of them, but for those especially who in past 
times benevolent and cosmical uses enjoyed but a 
brief or imperfect incarnation. Great numbers also 
of the inhabitants of the Solar-Spiritual Heavens 
will then incarnate as teachers and exemplars of 
mankind. Whether a time will soon come when all 
men will become vegetarians in their habits, time 
only can determine; though probably so, unless star- 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

eyed science shall, as now appears likely, become 
able to derive the foods of man directly from the 
earth's atmosphere, where the elements of all that he 
now has, or may have, are to be found in more per- 
fect union with the spiritual elements which perma- 
nently enfold and spiritually chemicalize and vitalize 
them for the uses of both the animal and spiritual 
vestments of man. 

The use of a purely vegetarian diet tends greatly, 
however, to the formation of an intellectual and 
spiritual high priesthood, whose function in the life 
of the Divine Humanity shall be to spiritualize the 
animal and spiritual bodies of the race. That pro- 
cess will go on until the racial animal body of man- 
kind shall become spiritualized and refined to a de- 
gree as yet unknown. Will continue until there shall 
no longer exist any of that antagonism between the 
aspirations and desires of the animal and the spirit- 
ual bodies of mankind alluded to by Paul : 'Tor the 
flesh warreth against the spirit and the spirit against 
the flesh." But the Soma or animal body will not 
become any the less robust or potent by this 
refining process, but, on the contrary, it will be- 
come vastly more powerful as well as healthy by it, 
until disease and death has been banished from the 
earth. 

Professor Berthelot, a French scientist, has for 
some time been experimenting on the synthetic pro- 
cess of deriving the foods of man direct from the 
atmosphere, and has recently announced that he has 
discovered a cheap process by which sugar can be 
made from the air we breathe, which in truth con- 
tains all the elements of the foods we use, both of a 
spiritual and terrestrial character. 

Part III. 

The priesthood in all ages have asserted and exer- 
cised their right to determine the kinds and quali- 
ties of the foods that mankind shall live upon. The 
principle is not only a true, but also a very important 

153 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

one for the government of mankind in Its early baby- 
hood estates and conditions. But they may carry 
the principle too far and in this way interfere with 
the perfect right that all should have, to choose 
their own spiritual foods when he has arrived at 
man's estate, just the same that he possesses to 
choose his own material foods as he approaches and 
attains physical manhood. 

Said St. Ambrose, referring to the Eucharist: "I 
believe it because it is impossible!" The remark 
shows how absolutely needful it is for rnen that may 
be endowed with great intelligence and even wisdom 
in the events and things of this world — to have some 
one — some authority — that they have confidence in — 
to select their spiritual food for them, not having 
any proper judgment in their ability to choose their 
own spiritual foods and nourishments. "For seeing 
they see not, and hearing they hear not, neither do 
they understand" the things of the Spiritual man. 

This is neither to be regarded as at all wonderful 
or to be regretted provided this is the motive that 
prompts so many to abandon their leanings and 
attachments and fall back into Rome or into its 
ecclesiastical and spiritual environments; though 
some without doubt have taken the step from lack 
of courage, and confidence in themselves, and others 
from mercenary motives. 

But one of the most powerful, perhaps the most 
powerful, of the inducements that cause men to leave 
their liberal attachments and to fall back into the 
older forms of spiritual organization, lies in the fact 
that so many living in too great laxity in the princi- 
ples of mental and moral freedom, have fallen into 
vicious and even criminal ways and habits of life. 
They indicate the near and swift approach of the new, 
diviner, more spiritual and social order of human life, 
^'New Spiritual Heavens and the New Earth" of 
John Apocalypse, xxi., i, and terrible crimes and 
seeming casualties are among the forces that are be- 
ginning to sweep the old order of things, viz.: the 
'Tirst" or the Old *'Heavens," political, social and 

154 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

other, and the *Tirst" or Old Earth, in its industrial, 
economical and social-industrial, and fearfully wrong 
and unjust aspects— off the stage of time and the 
world. 

''And I saw a new heavens and a new earth, for 
Old (or First) heavens and the old earth had passed 
away and there was no more sea/' 

This removal of the Old Heavens and the Old Earth 
spoken of in Rev. xxi., is referred to in Rev. x., 2, also 
in the fifth and sixth verses. The little book referred 
to in the second verse is social-industrialism or the 
new spiritual earth, which though it be very sweet 
to the taste of the most people is very bitter in the belly 
and very difficult of digestion and assimilation in the 
great body of the Divine Humanity, as it is already 
proving itself to be and will become still more so in 
the near future, when the old order of things must 
give place to the new Noviis Or do. For this is the 
moulting period of the planetary man, and is as abso- 
lutely indispensable to the life of the Divine Humanity 
that it should moult and cast off its old clothes, as 
it is for the caterpillar to moult into the Psyche or 
butterfly — just the same, and equally marvellous when 
the transformation has been fully accomplished. 

Its acomplishment will be attended with vast 
changes and more or less of human sorrow and suf- 
fering. But, if all souls will have faith in the wisdom 
and goodness of our Heavenly Father in causing us 
to pass through these vast transformations in the 
Divine Humanity, and will pray to him that they 
shal be attended with the least suffering and loss 
compatible with the working out of his vast plans and 
purposes concerning them, much can be done to miti- 
gate their sharpness; for the terrestial man has great 
power to co-operate with the spiritual heavenly man 
in this era which belongs to the woman, who is more 
gentle and lovable than is man, her male companion, 
and is destined to exert vast influence over the desti- 
nies of the world in all time and ways. 

"And the angel that I saw stand upon the sea and 
upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven, and 

155 



MAN*S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

swore by Him that liveth forever and ever, who created 
the heavens and the things that therein are, and the 
earth and the things that therein are ; and the sea and 
the things that are therein, that there should be time no 
longer.'^ 

In the, paragraph of Rev. x., we are given a proph- 
ecy that already and recentjy had its fulfilment and in 
a very wonderful way in the evolution of the means of 
communication over the whole earth. We have prac- 
tically annihilated time for our own darling little world 
and shall ere long doubtless co-operate with the peo- 
ples inhabiting the other planets of our solar systeni 
in establishing communication between our world and 
theirs, as hath already been mooted by intelligent men. 
This great universe that we have got into is in truth a 
marvellous thing. 

"But in the days of the voice of the seventh angel 
then he shall begin to sound the Mystery of God should 
be finished as he hath declared to his servants, the 
prophets." This prophecy has also been — is being — 
fulfilled at this very time in the history of man. This 
prophecy is made perfectly plain in the Eighty-second 
Psalm of David, so far as statement can make plain. 
It is also made very plain and obvious in John x., 34- 
36. But its true significance is held back both by the 
spiritual ignorance and the preconceptions of the great 
portion of mankind and by angelic interference until 
their spiritual understandings have reached that de- 
gree of evolution where they can receive and make 
use of this important truth without injury to them- 
selves individually and socially. 

For it is with angels as with men, who introduce all 
great truths and events upon the historic stage, each 
important truth or event making its entrances and 
exits in its own exact and proper time, otherwise con- 
fusion, disorder and great injury would result to the 
highest interests of civilization. There are great num- 
bers of arcana that have lain in an occult and dormant 
condition on the pages of the Divine Word, patiently 
biding the time when they will be called to participate 
actively in the mighty march of the ages. We have 

156 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

a beautiful exemplification of this law in the treatment 
of the vast and important truth disclosed by the Mas- 
ter and recorded in Rev. xxii., i6, both by angels and 
by mankind, who were not permitted to ''receive'' and 
appropriate this very important and creed-destroying 
arcanum until certain older truths and foods had be- 
come sated and unfit for spiritual use and were mak- 
ing their exits to give place to the new. The spiritual 
and the rational understandings of men have advanced 
to a stature that not only premits but demands it. 
For, indeed, and in truth, this is the time spoken of by 
the angel in Rev. x., when the voice of the seventh 
angel is ''beginning'' to sound forth the mighty truth 
that the kingdoms are become the kingdoms of our 
Lord and of his Christ: '*And he shall reign forever 
and ever.'' The reader will note that the ''finishing" 
or full unfoldment of this mighty ''Mystery of God" 
that has dominated man during all the long ages of 
the spiritual-Sarval and infantile estates, making him 
appear unto himself as an abject "worm of the dust" 
— takes place when the seventh angej shall "begin" 
to sound the "finishing** or ending of the mystery, be- 
ing anterior to the sounding of the trumpet of the sev- 
enth angel which will not take place until a time sub- 
sequent to the unfoldment of the mystery, as the "be- 
coming" of the kingdoms of our Lord and his "Christ" 
on the part of the kingdoms of this world is a continu- 
ous action, and though swiftly advancing will require 
a little time yet for its full and perfect completion. 

There is a wonderful significance in this action of 
the "mighty angel," that in this beautiful symbolic 
picture represents the vast social-industrial concerns 
of men in placing his feet upon both sea and land, and 
by so doing and in this manner appropriating the whole 
world and all that it contains in behalf of and as a 
representative of the whole people whose patient toil 
and genius has accomplished this wonderful annihila- 
tion of time, and has brought the ends of the earth 
together. 



157 



MAN*S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



FORCES PERSONAL AND IMPERSONAL. 

In this work-a-day universe of the living God, men 
and angels, who are spiritually advanced men in de- 
carnate conditions, are the factors, or the doers and 
actors of the Living Word. 

The highest forms of the living forces that carry on 
all the vast operations of universal life are the organic 
personal forces — the men and women, whether incar- 
nate or decarnate, that do the work — as the Bible itself 
has stated (and spiritual science reveals) : ''All things 
were made by him (Christ) and without him was not 
anything made that was made." But this statement 
which was intended for the infant spiritual man as a 
literal truth in the earlier ages of Christianity, hath in 
it a higher, more perfect truth or revealment for the 
more advanced spiritual man of to-day: and that 
higher truth is the fact that Christ, in this statement 
of the Word, has a representative meaning. He stands 
for humanity itself. It is plain to see that he could 
not have done the work alone. He must have co-oper- 
ation infinite, and there must be untold numbers of 
them co-operating with our Christ in the world-build- 
ing and man-building work. We believe Dr. Abbott 
to be correct so far as his statement covers the whole 
ground, which it does not fully. 

There is a great ''First Cause'' but it is not a "First" 
cause as to chronological sequence, but in spiritual 
sequence of degree and kind. It is the prime cause of 
all other causes of inferior and less degree and rela- 
tionship. 

Dr. Abbott, in so defining and putting aside the idea 
of causation, has stepped off into space, as it were — 
into the inorganic world of chaotic forces, whither the 
most of his readers, at least, neither will nor can 
desire to follow him. 

He appears to have landed in the camp of the 
materialists. It remains to be seen what they will do 



MAWS PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

with one who finds something in this great infinite 
universe besides gross matter. 

Dr. Abbott's definition, if we rightly comprehend it, 
may be considered as in some respects a proper one 
to define the inorganic forces of the various spiritual 
atmospheres that surround the world, and as a spirit- 
ual envelope that includes and invests the entire uni- 
verse of all the worlds as the oversouL Like the 
atmosphere that invests our own world and which is 
constantly and forever flowing into and out of our 
bodies with every breath that we inhale or exhale, and 
is the force that aids in the work of carrying on all 
the affairs of the human system, both material and 
spiritual. And possibly this is what the doctor means 
when he says: "My God is an ever present force, 
which is manifest in all the activities of men and in 
all the workings of Nature." In this he is undoubtedly 
correct. And again when he says: "I believe in a 
God who is in and through of everything, and not 
an absentee God whom we have to reach through a 
Bible or some other outside aid, but a God that is 
closer than hands or feet." 

In this, too, his statement appears to be correct if 
we understand it rightly, and yet he probably looks 
still and only to these inorganic forces that reside in 
the atmospheres of the worlds for the source or foun- 
tainhead of them all, and not to the forces that are sent 
down to man by and from the living brain of the great 
infinite spiritual universe itself, which is what men 
call God. And rightly, too, if they will only be careful 
to distinguish in their thought which is meant. 
Whether it be the holo-kosm or Infinite God, or the 
Micro-cosm or finite one, for they are corresponden- 
tially alike, but for lack of right words to designate 
them we are apt to define and to use them as though 
literally alike — a usage that creates much confusion 
and manifold misunderstandings in the minds and 
in the hearts of men. 

When the doctor makes the statement that ''the Bible 
can no longer be accepted as ultimate, we hardly com- 
prehend his meaning, unless it be that men will spir- 

159 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KQSMOS. 

itually remain right where they are at present, holding 
on — many of them Uving, literally, on the merest 
husks of the Word, and hence becoming spiritually 
dead and incapable while in that condition of spiritual 
death, of making any genuine progress in spiritual 
things. 

If that be his meaning we agree with him and we 
further suppose that no intelligent man or woman 
will fail to agree with him in this view of it. 

But if he means to say that the Bible has been fairly 
outgrown as a spiritual textbook for the masses of 
mankind, especially when it has been taug^ht and 
received by men in the more interior and spiritual 
sense, certain portions of it, why then we are obliged 
to seriously differ with him. 

While we entirely repudiate the practice of Swed- 
enborg in his attempts to spiritualize a great portion 
of the Bible that concerns the physical, political and 
historical affairs of the Jews, we still hold that there 
are other portions of the occult Word that the greater 
portion of mankind, at least, have not reached spiritu- 
ally insoluble, inert and dead — their spiritual digestive 
organs do not grasp and appropriate them. The high- 
est and most perfect source of the energies and the 
forces that forever play upon and upbuild and sus- 
tain the life of man come from the mighty outflow from 
the celestial-spiritual brain of the universe — God in 
the very highest and most perfect of his divine celes- 
tial correspondences. For the universes like man have 
a twofold, yea, even a threefold circulation of the mag- 
netic and other foods and bloods that constitute the cir- 
culatory system of the vast Divine, Unutterable Being 
whom men truly worship as the one only God. 

From this solar celestial, spiritual brain of the Su- 
preme Being eternally pour forth those mighty cur- 
rents of the magnetic loves which are spiritual bloods 
and other life forces of the Divine Being, and stream- 
ing through its vast arterial system, invade, pervade 
and renew every part and atom of its infinite body. 

But these vital currents of the mighty food forces 
by which the vast population of this Infinite Being are 

i6o 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

fed and sustained, originate as we have seen, in the 
positive polaric forces of the celestial-spiritual solar 
worlds and descend downward and outward into every 
part, organ and function, not only of the higher worlds 
but also of all the terrestrial worlds that inhabit space 
and form the negative pole in this mighty cycle of 
world being. 

From all these lower (terrestial) worlds also forever 
flow forth responsive return currents which correspond 
with the venous circulation in the human body, to feed 
the suns and all their containments of spiritual being, 
and in this way to restore and to maintain the equilib- 
rium of the mighty circulatory system of the interior 
fluids of this vast Infinite Eus. 

For the suns, spiritual and material, feed the uni- 
verses and all their containments with the positive 
food forces, while in return the terrestrial worlds, 
which are the nurseries for rearing and educating 
God's great infinite family of spiritual child-men, feed 
the higher and solar worlds and all their belongings 
with those negative food forms, personal and imper- 
sonal which they require for their uses. The Gods in 
universal life in their relations with the Divine Human- 
ity, as we have elsewhere indicated, sustain a similar 
correspondential relation that the infinitely manifold 
cells of both the material and spiritual bodies of men 
have and hold to each other. And the ultimate uses 
which men and women subserve in the economies of 
universal life is to refit and renew the higher Gods 
and thus to bridge over the vast period of time em- 
braced in the next kosmic cycle that lies before them in 
the future, by a new incarnation with some of the 
Younger Gods who have through ages and manifold 
re-incarnations perfected their own being in terrestrial 
and spiritual estates. 

For this is the ultimate use, purpose and destiny for 
which man, the young infant God, who was made in 
the express image and likeness of the infinite God him- 
self {"let us make man in onr own image and likeness'^ 
— are the words of Jehovah) and has been called forth 
into being — to refresh, renew and perpetuate the 

i6i 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

higher Gods, when worn and weary from excess of 
age. They must have rest, refreshment and renewal 
of their bodies ere they go forth into a new cycle of 
the eternities of being and action. 

And thus do they, the Son and the Father, mutually 
eternize one another. 

Like Eneas when Troy was in flames, he takes his 
ancient father, Anchises, upon his young broad and 
strong shoulders and bears him forth into the world 
of life again and thus renews his age and perpetuates 
his existence. 

"And I gave unto them eternal life;" the statement 
applies equally to both. 

The benefits conferred are mutual and equal like and 
unlike, different and the same — and thus do they mutu* 
ally restore, renew and prepare one another to enter 
upon a new cycle in the rhythmic onflow of the infi- 
nite, eternal ages. 



CHURCHES AND CREEDS— WHAT ARE 

THEY? 

The Church is God in humanity, playing the infinite 
role of civilization. The word Church meaneth ''God's 
House" in the original, and was built upon the earth- 
plane to house God's great family of man during its 
spiritual infancy, against the inclemencies of time and 
world, and to act as a mighty lever to uplift mankind 
on tp the higher planes and spheres of life, of being, 
and of action. 

Sects and creeds are but the natural expression of 
the essential differentiations that necessarily exist in 
human life growing out of childhood conditions 
and the proper functionation of the great family of 
men, which takes place during the spiritual-larval and 
infantile stages of his being, but will ultimately dis- 

162 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

appear as he approaches nearer to manhood^s estate, 
where he will be better able to comprehend the * 'per- 
fect law of liberty'' for every soul of man; and that 
these natural differentiations in the spiritual life of 
man have been stamped upon his very inmost being 
by his Creator to enable him to perform the manifold 
offices, functions and uses in the social and spiritual 
life of the Divine Humanity that he forever destined to 
fulfill. 

Creeds are spiritual landmarks on this great ''scene 
of man," and perform important uses in the early 
stages of his progressive spiritual life. They also in 
some of their spiritual forms and features represent 
those standard spiritual foods upon which it is indis- 
pensable that the infant larval and spiritual man should 
be fed in order that he shall grow up in normal condi- 
tions. For "as a man thinketh so he is!^ And also, 
as a man eateth so he is: since to think is also to eat 
spiritually. They are correlative terms. 

For "Except ye eat of the flesh of the Son of Man 
and drink his blood ye have no (proper) life in you. 
For my flesh is meat indeed and hlood is drink indeed." 
In other words, they were standard spiritual foods 
upon which the spiritual catechism of the church were 
to be fed, neglecting which they (even) did not have 
any (true and normal) spiritual life whatsoever. 

Yes, the old German proverb is very true indeed: 
"Der mensch ist was er isst," or "Man is what he 
eats." 

Take twin children of the same father and mother, 
and of equal moral and mental endowments, and let 
one of them grow up under the highest moral, social 
and spiritual surroundings, and the other under the 
very lowest and basest environment of the streets 
and slums of a great city and an associate of the 
very worst of the criminal classes. They would 
never be recognized probably by any one as brothers 
of the same family, even though twins of very 
close resemblance, before separation, upon whom 
the experiment had been made, and so nearly alike in 
form and feature and mental and moral expression oi 

163 



MAN^S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

face at the outset that friends could not distinguish 
one from the other. The very different foods, mental, 
moral and even the material foods upon which they 
had subsisted during the years of their ascent from 
tender infancy to late adult life, would in all proba- 
bility have obliterated all trace of that wonderful pa- 
ternal resemblance that existed between them before 
they were separated from each other and placed under 
different mental, moral and material surroundings. 
They had lived so long upon a different menu, spiritual 
and other, and subject to that marvellous spiritual 
chemistry that worketh in every man — whether to 
build him up into greater sublime heights of the divine 
wisdom and glory or sink him into vaster deeps of 
moral and spiritual degradation each man must deter- 
mine for himself in the long run — hath wrought out 
in each a very different spiritual body built up indeed 
of quite different foods, forms and forces and as to 
their former apparent identity wholly unrecognizable 
to the eye of man. 

We belong to no one of the churches save to all 
of them in a sort of spiritual way. I went into one of 
them very many years ago when a young student, 
but as I could not take the creed entire, was allowed 
to enter by merely assenting to the Covenant. I shall 
always be devoutly thankful for having been permitted 
to enter and to abide in ''God's House" during those 
early years. 

We should greatly dislike to live in a world without 
a church, religion, Bible and without a God. The 
churches have been the central, mental, moral and spir- 
itual forces that have built up the civilizations of man- 
kind the world over, chief among which by far are 
those which have been established upon the formations 
established by the great teacher himself. 

We surmise that skepticism itself would tire of living 
in a Godless world and like Napoleon- desire to restore 
the old regime that had been overturned by the mad- 
caps of the revolution. 

The Presbyterian Church, at its late convention, did 
some wise things, and things that were otherwise. It 

164 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

did one very wise thing when it threw overboard the 
doctrine of the damnation of infants, those bfessed 
Httle ones that Christ took into his arms and blessed 
them as the special objects of the love and affection 
of the Heavenly Father. 

But the Church in convention, with nearly full sov- 
ereign powers we may say, would have done a much 
wiser thing still if it had placed before the world 
the spiritual, or better still, the scientific meaning, not 
only of his very strange doctrine of the eternal torture 
of little children, but its companion-doctrine of eternal 
reprobation. For this idea, like all others that come 
into human life, enter by virtue of certain truths that 
are lodged within it, but in symbolic forms that are 
visible only to the feminine or spiritual understanding 
but not to the masculine or rational understanding of 
man. But if it does seize hold of the very small frac- 
tion of the whole truth contained within the statement 
and expands it to cover the whole fact — the part for 
the whole, the symbol for that which only in a very 
partial manner represents the full fact, as this one 
should literally take the picture of the horse for the 
horse itself. 

Both of these doctrines are substantially true, and 
it is indeed a very strange and wonderful thing that 
it should ever have gotten into the narrow limits of 
the creed, or once having entered it should have re- 
mained in it for so long a time without having devel- 
oped its spiritual sense. 

This strange doctrine of the damnation of infant 
children in hell is due to the mistake of taking the 
narrow literal symbol, for the real, the broad eternal 
facts of man's wonderfid experiences while traversing 
the worlds in his everlasting flight through time, space 
and matter. As stated in a former paragraph, it is a 
very great and very serious injury to the incarnating 
spirit to be deprived of its material body, torn asunder 
when both the material and spiritual body are in so 
new, tender, imperfect and rapidly formative states, 
which we can easily see if we reflect .that this material 
counterpart of the incarnating spirit, viz., the material 

165 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

body, is nothing less than a great part of the digestive 
functions of the spirit man within, by which, in con- 
nection with the corresponding spiritual organs, the 
incarnating spirit was wont to digest, elaborate and 
refine its various foods, both of a spiritual and material 
character. He has lost it not alone as a laboratory/ for 
the refinement and assimilation of all his foods, mater- 
ial and other, but also as a beautiful and useful gar- 
ment to protect it against the inclemencies of this 
lower world. 

These are among the most important reasons why 
the demise of this material envelope of the infant man 
especially becomes a very great and mcalculable injur)/ 
to the infant spirit when deprived of these so important 
organs and functions whereby he ''lives, moves and 
has (healthful) being." The infant martyrs of the 
spiritual world are thus obliged to undergo a greater 
martyrdom than do grown people whose physical and 
psychical bodies we may very naturally suppose have 
become matured and incapable of serious detriment by 
the transition we call death. The sufferings that many 
of them experienced in their martyrdom were indeed 
terrible, but in most cases of brief duration. 

The troubles experienced by the little ones by their 
very premature and enforced introduction into spirit 
life can only be removed by long residence in spiritual 
life, and new incarnations in terrestrial conditions. 
And this is the reason why the church authorities of 
this world have been prompted and inspired by the 
Higher Powers to have this very strange doctrine of 
the terrible liabilities of little children put into the 
creed in the still more dreadful form of the eternal 
damnation of the little tots whom Jesus loved and 
honored with the especial love of the Father Himself; 
where it has remained for ages as an affront to God 
and a dreadful stumbling block to man, Christian and 
un-Christian, as no one would undertake to present the 
scientific sense and meaning thereof, 

For the removal of this evil of child martyrdom, 
from among mankind and womankind i<s a matter in 
which the church must and will be greatly concerned 
in the near future. 

i66 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



BABYLON. 

^'Come out of her, come out of her, oh, my people, 
and be not partakers of her sins,*' and her daring 
crimes against God and the Divine Humanity. 

This is a word of warning addressed to every right- 
minded man and woman of this age. "Babylon" is 
nothing more nor less than the old individualistic civ- 
ilization, now fast dying, that under the similitude of 
a city represents the old order of things under which 
man has lived during his long infancy. God — "The 
Higher Powers" — are making war against the Divine 
Humanity itself and its monstrous and unutterable 
crimes, fairly bombarding it with the terrific forces 
of the world to make room for the millennium — or the 
new spiritual social civilization. "The new heavens 
and the new earth" which is to take the place of the 
old as soon as the old can be gotten out of the way. 
The next fifteen years more especially will be a time 
of "great tribulation" for poor humanity, the object 
of which has been and still is to soften and fraternize 
the heart of man up to the "Golden Rule'' and to drive 
humanity up on to the higher spiritual planes of the 
social and spiritual life of man. 

Even the wars among the various nations of the 
earth tend in the same direction — make men acquain- 
ted and fraternal — preparing mankind for the organic 
life, and are co-operating with the mighty forces of 
the spiritual heavens, are organizing and crystalizing 
the "advance guard" of human life and are beginning 
to do effective work in organizing "the new heavens 
and the new earth." 

Humanity must now put aside its playthings, put 
its house in order, as did our people during the rebel- 
lion, and go to work in building up the new social 
order of civilization — ^the "Novus Ordo Saedorum/* 
or the New order of the infinite ages of the divine 
life of man. 

167 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



WHO IS JESUS? 

He is the latest and greatest of the Avatars that have 
ever come down from the Fatherhood into our world 
to instruct its people by precept and by example, word 
and deed, the great primeval truths of the Divine 
Logos, or Word. 

The word Avatar comes from A meaning from or 
out of — and vatera, and meaneth Fatherhood, and 
comes originally from the old Sanscrit word vatri or 
vater, which is found in the German as the word for 
father.* 

The Gods who superintend the building of the 
worlds, both temporal and spiritual, as well as the 
civilizations in which they afterwards fruit, live and 
co-operate in vast societies — fraternal in character, of 
different ranks, classes, orders, hierarchies, principal- 
ities and powers, and extend into and embrace the 
whole universe in all its higher world spheres, depart- 
ments and degrees. But sustain a paternal relation to 
the lower spheres where the children live and are 
growing up into manhood and the Godhood likewise. 
The children also, like the Fathers extend — live and 
co-operate throughout the entire universe, but in its 
low, lower and lowest departments of life and labor 
in the various worlds according to their manifold de- 
grees of growth and progress. Jesus himself refers 
to the paternal relations that exist between the higher 
and the lower worlds of life when he says : 

'1 came forth from the Father (hood) and am come 
into the world. Again I leave the world and return 
to the Father" (hood). 

We, here, in these lower spheres and conditions of 
our dear old earth, are but an infinitesimal fraction 
of that vast infinite family of men, women and chil- 
dren that swarm over and people all the lower worlds 



♦Revised February 20, 1906. 

168 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

that inhabit space, and are growing up into a larger, 
wiser and nobler manhood and womanhood for the 
needs and uses of the Gods when fully grown. 

This great family of growing children, vast num- 
bers of whom as we have heretofore intimated, have 
but recently emerged from the animal world, with 
something of the form, but very little of the mental 
and moral status of mankind, have to be taught, edu- 
cated and grown up into higher degrees of life, labor, 
and progress in spiritual estates and conditions. It 
is to superintend this labor of educating these men, 
children and others thatthe gods, veiling their glori- 
ous forms in the flesh, come down and mingle with 
the men of earth to teach, instruct, govern, encourage 
and lead them forward and upward into the divine 
life of the perfected man and woman. 

It was at a convention of the Gods who had superin- 
tended the work of creating our world, and at a time 
when it had been prepared and made ready for the 
advent of man upon it, that the word went forth, "Let 
us make man (and) "in our own image and likeness" 
— for the earth is now ready for his advent and resi- 
dence. 

Without the aid of these holy men w^ho have been 
the teachers, exemplars and leaders of mankind 
through the long ages of his residence upon the world, 
without their aid to instruct and illuminate and inspire 
him to resist and overcome the powerful attractions 
of the flesh, it would have been quite impossible for 
man to rise superior to these potent tendencies and 
impulses of the fleshly man, and he would have re- 
mained forever subject to the law of the flesh — the 
mere human animal that he was when he first 
emerged from the animal world, in which he was ges- 
tated for some millions of years. 

Yes, the man Christ Jesus — which signifies "The 
Anointed Healer^' — was a spiritual map, was a chart, 
a picture, of the human soul in all its higher modes, 
tenses, conditions and estates, mentally, spiritually and 
metaphysically — a standard man in all the fulness 
of the divine perfection, and was sent down into our 

1 60 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS\ 

world by the divine Godhood Fatherhood — for they 
are one — for an example, a representative man of the 
higher man or gods of the higher spheres of the spir- 
itual Hfe of man; and to become the world's teacher 
in the more practical and the higher forms of the 
word. 

For Christ, both in word, deed and in his entire life 
was the most practical exemplar of the doctrines of 
the Word — the most perfect combination of the real 
and the ideal, the practical, philosophical and spiritual, 
that has yet descended from the spiritual world to rep- 
resent at once the manhood and the fatherhood of that 
world in their greater perfection. 

As Christ said of Himself: "I am come a light into 
the world that whosoever believeth on me should not 
abide in darkness." 



THE MYSTERY OF GOD. 

"And I saw another mighty angel come down from 
heaven clothed with a cloud, and a rainbow was upon 
his head and his face was as it were the sun, and his 
feet as pillars of fire, and he had a little book open: 
and he set his right foot on the earth and cried with 
a loud voice as when a lion roareth ; and when he had 
cried seven thunders uttered their voices. And the 
seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was about 
to write: And I heard a voice from Heaven, saying: 
Seal up those things which the seven thunders 
uttered; write them not. 

"And the Angel which I saw stand upon the sea and 
upon the earth lifted up his hand to heaven and swore 
by Him who liveth forever and ever, who created 
heaven and the things that therein are, and the earth 
and the things that therein are, and the sea and the 
things that are therein, that time shall be no longer." 

170 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

This remarkable prophecy has already received its 
fulfilment. 

During the past three-quarters of a century it 
requires but a very brief time in minutes or seconds to 
send a message around the globe. But with wireless 
telegraphy there is no appreciable loss of time incurred 
in the transition of news from place to place, the 
communicating parties standing, as it were, face to 
face. The prophecy hath in this respect been marvel- 
lously fulfilled. But in the days of the seventh angel, 
when he shall begin to sound the ''Mystery of God^ 
should be finished — as he hath declared to his servants 
the prophets — David, Isaiah, Micah and others. The 
seventh angel is the angel of peace, as will be seen 
by referring to Rev. xi., 15: ''And the seventh angel 
sounded and there were great voices in heaven saying 
the kingdoms of this world are to become the king- 
doms of our Lord and of his Christ and he shall reign 
forever and ever. 

This declaring of the ''Mystery of God" does not 
wait for its complete fulfilment of the prophecy spoken 
of in Rev. xi., 15, but at the time when that angel 
begins to sound. 

Japan came into the kingdom of the rule of peace 
and good will nearly a half century ago. And this 
rule of love, of peace, and of good will — ^what is it, 
otherwise than the kingdom of the heavens? That is 
just what it is, and Japan is the pioneer nation in the 
Orient that has led the way peacefully into the king- 
dom of the heavens. It is a great honor for the great- 
little nation, and well she deserves it. It is no wonder 
the statesmen of spirit life who preside over the des- 
tinies of the nations, sided so emphaticalUy with Japan 
during her great and terrible struggle with Russia, 
performing such prodigies of valor and of endurance 
as the world has never seen surpassed in any age or 
in any countrv in the world. 

But the "Mystery of God." What is it other than a 
"finishing," a removal of the dense veil that has hung 
over the world of mankind during the long dark ages 
of his ignorant childhood? But the veil has at last 

171 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

been taken away, and those who fear to assert the 
divinity that rightfully belongs to them, it is due either 
to a lack of faith in themselves or in the plainest 
teachings of the divine Word. Did not Christ on that 
memorable occasion when the Jews twice took up 
stones to kill him for his blasphemy, as they regarded 
his words — did he not assert the common divinity, the 
Universal Brotherhood that unites and fraternizes all 
men, when he plainly told the Jews: ''Doth not your 
Scripture say, I — ^Jehovah — said ye are Gods/' Now 
if He called them gods, to whom the word of God 
came — viz., the common people — ''Say ye of him 
whom the Father hath sanctified and sent into the 
world, thou blasphemest because I said I am a Son 
of God?" 

In this utterance of the Master he asserts the divin- 
ity common to all men, himself included, and in the 
plainest possible terms that human language admits of. 

In this manner doth the great Teacher in the broad- 
est and most unequivocal terms assert the common 
divinity of all men — of whom he was one — with the 
difference between himself and them that he was a 
teacher sent from God to teach men. Nothing can be 
plainer than these plain words of the Master, which in 
the most unmistakeable terms assert and proclaim the 
eternal divinity of man and finishes and ends the 
great "Mystery of God." They differ from them 
only in degree of advancement — growth, progress — 
and are all of them en route to the high hills of immor- 
tality and eternal life, to mingle with the high gods — 
themselves also gods — and mutually eternize each 
other in a new incarnation, a new cycle and a renewal 
of their unending life. 



ORGANIC. 

I have been informed by scientists who have lived 
long in spirit life that the origin of species is due to 
the incarnation of some spirit form — some organic 

172 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

principle of pure spiritual life upon some correspon- 
dent entity that is living in utero — or in other words 
in the womb of the mother. For in truth the germs, 
the organic principles of all life come from the spiritual 
realms of life. 

It is to this being that for the time exists in the 
mother's womb and is completing one of its own 
cycles of involution and evolution that comes the abil- 
ity to bridge over the spaces that lie between the infi- 
nitely varied forms of life that everywhere exist in the 
realms of life. 

And this principle or law not only obtains and gov- 
erns in the descent of spirit forms into material forms 
or involution, but applies also to the ascent of the ma- 
terial life forms into higher and more refined forms 
and conditions of the Life Universal. It is law. This 
law or principle by which life forever flows onward in 
the evolution and sustenance of the infinitely varied 
that everywhere greet the eyes of the beholder in all 
parts of God's great and blessed universe. 

The universe, or as its name implies, the *^^one 
REVOLVING*' is itself but one being — ^that in its vast- 
ness comprehends all life. It is the divine, infinite 
holocosm or most perfect man — ^the macrocosm or 
''grand man'' of Swedenborg. 



DIFFERENTIATIONS. 

The Seer is one who, in his inspired hours, intro- 
duced by the Higher Gods behind the veil of flesh 
and sense, and they reveal to him, hitherto, "unut- 
terable things." 

Re-incarnation is Creation's law: 
By it the monad doth ascend to man ; 

Man to the Angel; Angel to the God; 
One all-embracing and eternal Plan. 

173 



MAN'S PLACE IN THEJCOSMOS. 

But this is only incidental to our present purpose. 
I desire to say a few words on differentiations in 
thought foods, or the "Hving biead/' 

"What is Truth ?'' The question is coeval with the 
race ; one, at least, that extendeth back to the time in 
his history when man began to be filled with a de- 
sire to eat of the fruits of the tree of the Higher 
Knowledges and the Truths of Life. 

One of the aspects in which we desire to consider 
Truth is its diversity — the infinite shades of differ- 
ence in form, substance and essence, in its infinitely 
varied and varymg forming and reforming integra- 
tions and combinations as foods for human material 
and spiritual uses and requirements. 

'Both human, animal and spiritual foods differ as 
greatly — running into infinitely differentiated com- 
binations, forms and essences in their integrations — 
as do human beings in form, face and characteris- 
tics. And this marvelous order exists manifestly by 
the design and purpose of the Infinite, All- Wise 
Creator of all things ; not only to stimulate, and, at 
the same time, satisfy the appetite and desire for 
truth foods, but more especially to create thereby 
an infinite variety and diversity of spiritual foods for 
mankind, — and thereby to stimulate spiritual 
growth, — as well as animal foods, and to adapt them 
to the infinitely varied and varying necessities and 
wants of that omnivorous and infinitely differen- 
tiated being — man. 

Given proper conditions, and human beings soon 
differ as greatly in the forms and qualities of the 
food they eat as they differ in face, feature, and in 
their more interior qualities and forms of life. But 
insomuch as the exterior and interior forms and 
qualities of every soul of man have an exact corre- 
spondence, so likewise will his tools, temporal and 
spiritual, adapt themselves to the interior require- 
ments and the laws by which his whole being moves 
on and unfolds. 

So deeply doth this Divine law of our existence 
and unfoldment penetrate into the order of our life 

174 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

forces — ^these infinite differentiations and correspon- 
dencies — ^that even in matters of our temporal goods 
it has become a matter of common observation that 
"one man's food is another's poison — though very- 
few have as yet gotten over the habit of importun- 
ing his neighbor to eat a little of what agrees so well 
with himself. Herein is to be found one of the great- 
est sources of inharmony among mankind; mdeed, 
probably the very greatest, when we consider the 
social, religious, and even the civil, antagonisms that 
exist among men. It springs from what to the ma- 
terial or infant understanding appears as the perfect 
simplicity of Truth, and its lack of diversity in 
human uses and needs. *'The mind sees only that 
which it brings with it the power to see." 

Every soul is so constituted as to occupy a differ- 
ent standpoint of both longitude and latitude upon 
the spiritual earth ; and, hence, views the whole spirit- 
ual Heavens under a different aspect. 



PROGRESSIONS. 



What is little Grecia, the founder of the arts, 
sciences, philosophies and democracies in their more 
primitive and embryonic forms? And what is Rome, 
chosen by Divine Providence also to play its part 
in the great drama of civilization to represent law — 
civil, social, religious, political — yea, to give law to 
Christianity itself in all its primeval and more rudi- 
mentary forms, ceremonies and doctrmals? What 
are these but coins of the different races of man- 
kind, cut in different ages from the original paternal, 
tree of Ayrian stock and grafted into the ruder and 
more primitive races that dwelt in the beautiful 
vales of Italy and of Greece. What was little Judea? 
What were all these glorious countries and their 
peoples but a trinity of spiritual kindergartens—^ 

175 



MAN'S PLACE W THE KOSMOS, 

nurseries where the Celestial Creative gardeners of 
the spiritual heavens, who superintend and direct 
the forces of civilization, had planted, cultivated and 
developed these germs of spiritual truth and life that 
were first to prepare the way for Jesus and his word, 
but were afterward to undergo a second incarnation 
in the spiritual womb of the mighty mother church 
of Rome to properly gestate the infantile and even 
the larval''' man of those times, which she received at 
the hands of barbarians that overran Italy and 
Greece so often during the early ages of Christianity. 
''Rome," as was well said by the historian Froude, 
"Rome is the most marvelous institution that hu- 
manity ever threw out of itself/' It gave law and 
perfect form to all things concerning life and its 
priesthood became the spiritual nurse of mankind 
and decided for it what was proper, spiritual food for 
its spiritual babies. In doing this her priesthood and 
the later priesthoods of Protestantism have con- 
ferred an infinite benefit on the entire race of man ; 
and none the less for their suppression of the mani- 
fold little sects and sectlets that have attempted to 
come upon the stage of time since Christianity came, 
much to its advantage, and with a vast saving of 
blood for all Europe. 

Had the political feudalisms that grew up all over 
Europe been allowed by Rome to be reinforced by a 
multitude of religious feudahsms, the blood that 
would have been shed to get rid of them would have 
been vastly greater than it has cost mankind to pre- 
vent their formation. And this has been one of the 
offices and duties of the Romish church, to suppress 
the religious cranks (most of them) nipping them 
well in the bud. It has greatly facilitated the forma- 
tion of the great nationalities of Europe under com- 
mon languages, a common religion and a common 



* Nearly all the very lowest races of mankind today are 
little else than spiritual larvae of men and will be obliged 
to pass through the spiritual womb of the churches to 
enable them to ascend into the spiritual, rational and ce- 
lestial planes of being. 

176 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

civilization. In the formulation of the religions of 
mankind Rome has done for modern civilization 
what the Jewish priesthood has done for that people 
that gave Christ to the world. The high spiritual 
truths taught by Jesus were most of them out of 
the spiritual reach of the greater portions of man- 
kind of his times. They were too strong meat for 
their spiritual digestion and assimilation and had to 
be run through the spiritual laboratory of the priest- 
hood to have them prepare such foods for these 
moral and spiritual babies as they could properly 
masticate, digest and assimilate to their infantile 
systems. Jesus himself recognized this spiritual in- 
ability of the men of his time — even the learned men 
of the Jewish church. "They, seeing, see not, and 
hearing, hear not, neither do they understand,'' and 
some times reproved his own disciples for their 
lack of spiritual perception. 

Regarding the division of the church in later 
years into several leading branches that also is a wise 
arrangement of Divine Providence, better fitting it 
for its divine uses, giving the human intelligence 
greater freedom of action by better adapting it to 
the various mental and spiritual estates mto which 
that intelligence naturally differentiates itself. 



SCRAPS OF TRUTH. 



It requires vast time for Nature to build up a man, 
beginning with the slime of old Mother Ocean — **pro- 
toplasm'' as it is termed by science — and *'dusc of the 
earth" as it is called bv Moses in Genesis. But it does 
not demand a tithe of the time that is required to build 
a Darwinian man . . 

The **Day'' that is spoken of in Genesis is not one of 
twenty-four hours, as there are various forms and 
lengths of days that are mentioned in the Bible, which 

177 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

are cycles of time, cosmic in character, and are termed 
^'days'' bcause they fulfill certain correspondential 
relations with each other and also by reason of the 
poverty of language, which is not rich enough to detail 
a new word for every phasis of meaning in the uses of 
words, and hence employs the same word often for 
manifold phases of the same idea, and for ideas wholly 
dissimilar often. In the Apocalypse of John and also 
in the prophet Daniel the w^ord "day" is used to em- 
brace a cycle or period of 365 ordinary days of twenty- 
four hours, while in another place it is declared that 
"one day with the Lord is as a thousand years : and a 
thousand years as one day/' 

The "day'' spoken of in the first chapters of Gene- 
sis comprehends a geological cycle or day of seven 
hundred and fifty thousand of our years. It is a geo- 
logical cycle which is the longest of the cycles 
spoken of in the Bible, and may have been made use 
of in this occult form and way to help maintain this 
beautiful allegory in its present mythical form until 
science had arrived upon the stage of time and world : 
and the scientific mind also. This would make the 
entire period required to build up the plant and ani- 
mal life of the world about 4,500,000 of our years — an 
ample time for this part of the labors of creation if 
we cast overboard the absurd and wholly untenable 
theory of Mr. Darwin with its infinitesimal increments 
of change, and adopt the more perfect and scientific 
one everywhere to be seen in the world about us, and 
held by such great scientists as Culver, Agassiz, Liebig 
and others, certainly quite as great and distinguished 
in the same department of natural history and kin- 
dred fields of investigations as was Mr. Darwin him- 
self. 

If we can accept this statement of the time that 
was taken by the creative intelligences in the work of 
developing the planet and the animal life of the planet, 
and then backward and contemplating the still vaster 
periods of time that must have been required to 
build up the nucleus of the planet, cool down its enor- 
mous heat, and lay down its manifold strata, we should 

178 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

likely approximate a period of time nearly if not quite 
equal to the period of time recently assigned to the age 
of the planet by Lord Kelvin, who placed it at about 
twenty millions of years — which, though in truth it 
be a vast period of time for actual creative work, it 
is, notwithstanding, but a brief space of time when it 
is compared with the time of three hundred millions 
of years, which Mr. Darwin assigned to the work 
accomplished by the waves in triturating and wearing 
down a certain portion of the Walden range of moun- 
tains on the coast of England. 

The truth is that scientists are reading better the 
wonderful story of the rocks and at the same time are 
meeting with a new class of facts which they cannot 
so easily bend to their theories as many of those upon 
which they depended to sustain their theories, many of 
them now well known to be false. 

Newer views, truer views and more telling facts 
have upset already many of these false theories of 
creation that have been advanced by the materialists ; 
and many others are destined to follow them; and 
hence the opinion of Lord Kelvin, one of the highest 
if not the very highest of them all in his department 
of science. 

Recently a gentleman who has for years made a 
close study of Mt. Pelee and its terrible work of 
destruction of the lovely little city located at its base, 
brings back the report that all vestige of the place 
has been totally wiped off the face of the earth, and 
that the earth on which the city formerly stood is 
covered with a vast bed of lava, fast changing into 
granite! 



INDIA. 

Poor India! The true Niobe of nations. For 
thousands of years prostrate beneath the feet of 
the animal world and best illustrative among the 

1/9 



MAWS PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

nations of the relations of man to the animal world 
in which he was gestated, and out of which he 
sprang. In this function assigned to that people by 
the Creative Wisdoms, of illustrating in life and in 
history. He has done so both in normal and abnor- 
mal conditions and degrees. There is nothing so 
low in the scale of being that he does not acknowl- 
edge him as a brother and literally treats him as 
such. It is not any mere ideal spiritual relation ex- 
isting between man and his inferior brother in the 
lower realms of being, but a literal and eternal truth 
that he feels himself obliged to observe in manifold 
ways, in his intercourse with the citizens of the great 
primitive under-world of animated life. It is no 
whim or caprice of his that has caused him to ob- 
serve the sacred law of relationship that exists be- 
tween man and the antecedent forms of life below; 
him ; it is due to the part and office so assigned him 
by the Great Architect in His original distribution 
of the organs and functions of the Divine Humanity 
among the races and nations of the world. 

Allied closely with the Jew in racial conditions, 
and destined, like him, to illustrate the sacrificial 
functions that symbolize the methods of procedure 
by which he ascends from the feebly and partially 
united forms of the individual man up into the divine 
integration of the social man in the Divine Human- 
ity — the Cosmic man — the two people have been 
called to perform both opposite and reciprocal func- 
tions. 

Both have performed "blood sacrifices." But while 
the Jew has sacrificed the animal, the Hindu has sac- 
rificed himself — yea, and herself. Witness the fu- 
neral pyre where untold thousands of widows an- 
nually went up in flames; the Ganges, where great 
numbers of infants were thrown to the crocodiles, 
and the thousands otherwise sacrificed to wild 
beasts. 

Each people symbolizes the living eternal facts 
and forces that play throughout in the infinite thea- 
ter of Universal Life ; but each represent these forces 

i8o 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and their symbols under different conditions and as- 
pects. The Hindu, as we have said, makes a sacri- 
fice of himself. He represents in symbolic forms, not 
only the principle of self-sacrifice, but of self-salva- 
tion. 

When the human mind has arrived upon the plane 
of reflection, self-study, self-know^ledge, man then 
becomes sufficiently intelligent to co-operate with 
the celestial, man-building, world-building forces of 
Universal Life, and to assist them in the work of 
self-evolution, self-building and rebuilding, so far 
as that principle can be carried out by the individual 
alone. But in truth that ability of self help is small 
until he reaches a very high plane. 

The Hindu, more than any of the primitive relig- 
ious cult races, represents the important principle 
in human life. It is the principle also of Individual- 
ism put into the self-evolving and differentiating 
forces. But carried to its logical results it necessarily, 
in his case, arrays society into four great castes or 
classes whose walls of separation are as impenetrable 
as the everlasting rock. It is the stoical or male 
form of Wisdom with no proper co-operation with 
the feminine principle of Love. And hence Theoso- 
phy is very properly termed the Wisdom (mascu- 
line) religion. 

Buddha, Socrates, Confucius, and many other 
great Avatars,* taught the religion of the head. 
Christ, the last and greatest of them all, taught the 
philosophy of the heart. The former taught the re- 
ligion of the rational understanding as applied to 
morals and materials. The office of Christ was to 
teach the religion of Love, of the Spiritual under- 
standing of Sociology, of the Paternity of God and 
the Brotherhood of Man. 



* Avatar. — Literally one sent by and from tHe Father- 
hood or Vatara: — to teach mankind. 

i8i 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



THE METAPHYSIOLOGY OF THE 
SPIRITUAL MAN. 

Saith Paul: "There is a natural body, and there 
IS a spiritual body." How Paul came in possession 
of so occult an ontological fact, in an age and coun- 
try so densely ignorant and materialistic, we do not 
know, but imagine it came to him more as a spirit- 
ually inspired truth, rather than from any constant 
rational perception of so important a spiritual prin- 
ciple, in all scientific and logical bearings and re- 
sults. 

Be that as it may, tfiere is in deed and truth a 
wonderful analogy and correspondence between the 
two organisms. As the mollusk secretes within its 
more interior and delicate organs the material of 
which its external shell or house is formed, and 
which, with an art divinely cunning, it weaves about 
itself ; as the tree clothes itself roundabout with the 
rough covering of bark, to protect the more delicate 
sap vessels of the interior; so, in like manner, doth 
that divinest artificer, the spiritual man, sit back be- 
hind the so-called "visible" and fabricate that really 
wonderful house we term "natural body," which, 
though of apparently coarser texture and mold than 
is the spiritual body, it is designed to nourish and 
protect, is, nevertheless, in shape like unto it, and in 
itself is a marvel of design and beauty, when perfect- 
ed ; and is well adapted, in all respects, to minister 
to the needs of the living artist that sits within and 
weaves it in the loom of Time. In real truth, this 
terrestrial house, in which man temporarily resides, 
fulfills the still more important function of a labora- 
tory or stomach, in which he digests, and elaborates 
the forces of this terrestrial plane of being, as the 
basic elements of the spiritual and spiritual-celestial 
body. 

Matter is only the name of one of these basic forces 
that sustain the universe of Being, and the grossness 

182 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, ' 

of it consists mainly in the grossness of our ideas re- 
garding it. It externalizes itself, or, more strictly 
speaking, the higher forces externalize themselves 
through matter in three dimensions ; but the higher 
forces operate within, in a ''fourth dimension'* (of 
Prof. Zollner), as the shaft works in the slot, the 
hand in the glove. 

It is by and through this fourth dimension that 
the celestial-spiritual man, after one of his long 
flights through the eternities and infinities of time 
and space, descends ("falls") into terrestrial states 
and forces — even descends into the Hells — to re- 
build, renew, refresh, re-incarnate and more fully 
eternize his spiritual-celestial body. 

As the external body has parts, organs, functions, 
so has the spiritual body; and in the true spiritual- 
celestial man and woman, as distinguished from the 
lower or animal man, which is not in itself subject 
to the laws of spiritual good or God, until similiated 
and harmonized with and by the higher or spiritual 
man, it becomes of the highest order both in sub- 
stance and in form, being wrought out from the 
highest, holiest loves, affections, truths, principles 
of the spiritual worlds. 

"The first man is of the earth, earthy," for the 
reason that his body is developed out of the animal 
kingdom below him, and on the terrestrial plane of 
being, and partly out of the mundane forces, by the 
Creative Intelligences; and it is designed to serve 
the purpose of a ready made house to live in ; a ready 
made garment to clothe himself withal ; and a ready 
made laboratory to aid him in the easy elaboration 
of those elemental forces with which he is to re- 
clothe, rebuild and refurnish his more permanent 
home — the more Divine, precious and holy, eternal, 
spiritual-celestial man — the Man-God. 

Man as to his foods is an omnivorous being. He 
is not only a plant eater but an eater of animals, in 
some phases of his manifold being. Both the plant 
and the animal have previously passed the elemental 
forces and foods of the material world through the 

183 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

refining and reconstructive processes of tHeir own 
digestive organs, thereby raising these elementary 
forces to a higher organic level before being used by 
the animal man. 

Now, he lives upon the higher spiritual-social and 
spiritual-celestial forms, foods and forces in a some- 
what similar manner. Every soul with whom he is 
brought into touch in the Divine harmonies in spirit- 
ual social life, is engaged in the labor of eating, di- 
gesting, elaborating spiritual truths, foods, forces, in 
the laboratory of his own interior, spiritual being, 
and elevating these spiritual foods to still higher 
food levels. Yea, all true spiritual men eat one an- 
other — impart to each other their spiritual blood 
(loves) and spiritual flesh (wisdoms) to nourish, up- 
build and sustain each other. 

It is by these Divine offices of imparting each to 
the other and to all, in a degree, these Divine, so- 
cial-spiritual foods, by ways, words and works of 
love and use, and by eating one another mutually 
and functionally, that the social, spiritual-celestial 
man is made to otherize himself — to build himself 
into his entire social environment of souls and into 
the higher societies of the spiritual and celestial uni- 
verses of God. 

. . . "That they all may be one : as thou Father 
art in me and I in thee, that they also may be one in 
us," — thus not only making the terrestro-social man 
one in spiritual life with his fellows but one and at- 
one with the higher celestial men and women of the 
spiritual worlds, for in very truth, when properly 
discerned, this is the great "Atonement," — the Son 
with the Father, — the Brotherhood of Man with the 
Fatherhood of God. 



184 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 



THE SOLAR-SPIRITUAL WORLDS THAT 
. - SURROUND OUR STAR— THE SUN. 

Not long since the beloved Seer, Swedenborg, 
came to me and informed me that the Zodiacal Light 
• — which is a wonderful zone or belt of bright light 
that invests the solar orb on all sides of it — is the 
basis, the foundation of our permanent Spiritual 
Heavens. This bright and beautiful body is often 
visible for some time after the sun has set and for a 
time, also, in the morning before he rises, — visible 
to the naked eye of man, — and especially during 
the winter season, in very cold weather, when the 
earth's atmosphere is more transparent and clear 
than ordinary. 

Astronomers have for a long time indulged in 
much controversy and speculation as to what this 
remarkable phenomenon is due ; of what composed, 
etc., etc. 

Speaking of its extent Prof. Swift, of the Lowe 
Observatory, says: *'It seems to surround the sun, 
but there is evidence that it has been seen, in the 
winter, stretching across the sky to the Eastern hori- 
zon. If this be so, then it also surrounds the earth, 
and the diameter of the ring must be at least two 
hundred millions of miles. I have twice seen it reach 
to the Eastern horizon. It appears to be the shape of 
a double convex lens^ the center of which is the 
sun/' 

Astronomers give us no idea of the width of this 
wonderful body, but Swedenborg states that it and 
the corresponding width of the many concentric 
spheres or Spiritual Heavens that surround the solar 
orb are about five hundred thousand miles each in 
width, and that it extends outward into space far 
enough to include the farthest planet, or Neptune 
as astronomers reckon, though the Celestials speak 
of three others. 

I will not stop here to discuss the composition of 

185 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

this singular body, Y^hich astronomers generally re- 
gard as rather of a material character, but which 
Swedenborg and other celestial astronomers assert 
that it is magnetic. 

He informs me that the first or lowest spiritual 
sun-sphere is located about half a million miles from 
the solar orb, and passing outward beyond this the 
various spiritual and spiritual-celestial sun-spheres 
are severally situated, about one hundred and fifty 
thousand to one hundred and seventy-five thousand 
miles distant from each other; and that those which 
are already more or less inhabited are about fifty in 
number; but these do not include all that are more 
or less perfect in their natural formation, as these 
extend very nearly as far out as our planet Mercury. 
They extend a good way farther out than our planet 
earth. Bui such are only in a partial state of evolu- 
tion and will require a much greater time to prepare 
them for the advent and the occupancy of spiritual 
man. 

He states that ere our race have fully graduated 
from the material worlds of our solar system these 
spiritual spheres of this portion of the spiritual Hea- 
vens will be extended to the utmost limit of the 
solar system, and will then have wholly taken the 
places of the several spiritual Heavens that invest 
the various planetary orbs that form our system. 
These minor spiritual Heavens are, like the material 
worlds thmselves, but temporary places of residence 
— preliminary schools of training for the higher and 
final states and residences of the spiritual men. That 
when the inhabitants of our spiritual-solar orb or 
system of orbs have fulfilled their law of involution 
and evolution into and out of the realm of matter, 
so-called, — which is the negative pole of the Univer- 
coelum — ^by what is termed Re-incarnation, the ma- 
terial worlds including the great sun himself will 
become dead worlds. The spiritual worlds will 
throw them off as a man casts off his material body 
when he no longer requires it, and the material, 

i86 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

worlds will be taken out into space and exploded into 
nebulous or cosmic matter. 

The spiritual intelligences informed me of this 
final destiny of the suns, about the time I published 
the "Evolution of the Psyche/' but I did not pub- 
lish the statement at the time as I had no confirma- 
tory data to print with it. But as I have recently 
fallen in with a remarkable description of the death 
of a world, by Prof. E. S. Holden, of the Lick Ob- 
servatory, I will give it in this place. I quote : 

''The object of this paper is to detail the history 
of the remarkable 'new star,' of 1892, in the constel- 
lation Auriga. This star, which doubtless resembles 
our sun, within two days increased in brilliancy six- 
teen fold. Three months after its discovery it had 
become invisible! After another four months it re- 
appeared and was comparatively bright. But it was 
no longer a star, but a nebiila\ In other words, it 
had developed changes of light and heat which if 
repeated in the case of our own sun would mean a 
quick end of the human race and the utter annhila- 
tion of every vestige of animal and other life upon 
earth !" 

Yes; and of all life ugon all His worlds! But of 
this at another time. Prof. Holden concludes : 

"The results are of intense popular interest, as we 
have seen. Our sun is a star. 

"In studying the birth, death and resurrection of 
other stars we may be studying the past and future 
of our own sun, and, hence, be learning somewhat 
of the possible catastrophes that may overtake the 
earth.* 



* There are no catastrophes in iKe life of God's great 
universe. All things, including the worlds, are governed 
and guided by the same hand that made them — by fixed 
immutable eternal laws. But what are the laws but the 
modus Vivendi of the Divine Being himself, who lives in, 
animates, moves and directs the worlds and all their con- 
tainments with absolute and unerring certainty and mak- 
eth no mishaps or mistakes. To one who has perfect con- 

187 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS 

"Such catastrophes as produced the new star are 
indeed rare. I do not know that their study is espe- 
cially comforting to the human race. A new celes- 
tial body is born of them which, by its evolution, 
may produce a solar system like our own. But it 
was produced at the sacrifice of a previous system 
intrinsically as precious so one might say. But in 
the absence of definite knowledge, we have the right 
to assume that one universe is as good as another. 
In this case one universe was totally destroyed ; and 
on its ruins another may rise !" 

Recently — on the 4th of last June — there fell a 
very interesting specimen of cosmic matter near 
Effingham in the state of Kansas ; one weighing two 
hundred and fifty pounds and made up of iron and 
pebbles. 

What a "strange eventful history'' could this 
messenger from the skies, this fragment of a world, 
bring to us if it could repeat the whole story of its 
experiences. Who shall say through what distant, 
unknown portion of the vast realms of space the 
world, of which this tiny fragment was a part, ful- 
filled its mighty orbit ; what may have been the fate 
of its inhabitants ; and when did it come to its end ? 

Many of the strata of our own world are largely 
made up /from these cosmic materials that have been 
captured by the comets, which are the "common 
carriers" of space, and brought hither to our world 
when its "crust" was being formed. 

But all worlds are not subject to the same vicis- 
situdes; none of them until they have fulfilled the 
full measure of their years and the utmost limit of 
their usefulness. 

Our own satellite or moon is an example of a 
worldlet that is yet in its infancy; a mere nucleus 
or skeleton of a world center, not yet clothed upon 



fidence in the wisdom, power and goodness of the Supreme 
Being there is no field for the operations of Chance, Ca- 
price, Chaos or Devil. All things whatsoever are destin- 
ated, controlled and guided by His Almighty hand. 

188 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

with proper strata nor yet with seas and an atmo- 
sphere. Our own earth will yet become a sun, but 
not until it has performed its full routine of uses as 
a nursery for human beings ; has been re-incarnated 
again and again for this purpose, and has become, 
like Saturn and Jupiter, surrounded by a retinue 
of worldlets and worlds. For worlds are born, live 
and grow, through vast periods of time, fulfill their 
Divine uses in the economy of the universe and die. 
It is the law of all created beings ! 



THE CELESTIAL CITY. 

"And the city had no need of the sun, neither of 
the moon, for the glory of God did lighten it !" 

With our present conceptions of the origin of 
light, of heat, and in truth of all the vis vivae of Uni- 
versal Life, no more perfect description than the 
above could be given of the source of the light that 
illuminates, delights and glorifies the Eternal City. 

But perhaps the greatest difficulty one encounters 
in attempting to describe and define the things of 
the occult and — to the merely five-sensed man — 
the "invisible" realms of the spiritual worlds that 
inhabit space, lies in the fact that living as he con- 
stantly does only within that exterior realm of Na- 
ture, where the five senses are forever at play, and 
where he is eternally bombarded by her material, 
three-dimensioned forces, he finds it quite impos- 
sible to sense, much less to "see" and to realize, the 
superb realities and magnitudes of the spiritual uni- 
verses, revealed only to such as have advanced into 
the spiritual consciousness of Life, and, hence, abide 
more or less within the realms where the sixth and 
the seventh senses have play. 

To one who lives too much In the mire of the five- 
sensed realm of eternal Life, the things of the mind, 

189 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

and of the whole realm of spiritual life appear to 
him as unrealities, or as things he has been taught 
by the dicta of pseudo-science to regard as only the 
"affections of matter/' — a phrase well designed to 
conceal the confessed ignorance of Agnosticism, 
which, while confessing to complete nescience upon 
all the great questions that concern the things of 
the occult and invisible worlds, at the same time 
often displays an arrogance and intolerance toward 
those who profess belief in the occult that is sur- 
prising, and parades its own confessed ignorance of 
all knowledge of occult beings as proof positive that 
they neither exist nor can make themselves mani- 
fest. But this is nothing more than the tyranny of 
the five senses transferred to the realm of mind, by 
which it becomes subject to their illusions; for even 
the spiritual, or seven-sensed, man beconies more or 
less subject to the illusions and tyrannies of the five 
senses. 

The main difficulty with those living chiefly in 
the five-sensed and three-dimensioned realm of be- 
ing, consists mainly in their inability to conceive of 
any thing that can have a separate and a greater or 
less independent existence outside of and beyond 
the "visible/' tangible, temporal and so-called ma- 
terial forms of Life. Especially is it true when any 
attempt is made to give to these subtle and fluidic 
forces an organic and substantial shape. 

To the mind, however, that hath lived somewhat 
in the realm of the occult and the invisible, whose 
spiritual sight hath been quickened and made clear 
by the Celestial Euphrasia, the whole environing 
universe becomes a vast living Entity, formulated 
in time, space, form, substance, essence, force, di- 
mensions (within and without), eternities and in- 
finities — a Being that is spiritually nerved, muscled, 
ligamented, and animated throughout by the Celes- 
tial forms, forces, essences, melodies, harmonies and 
numbers ; and that the visible and tangible worlds — 
the suns and all their vast retinues of worlds and 
worldlets that inhabit space — are but the fulcrums 

190 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

upon which the Gods rest their vast levers ; the foot- 
stools upon which they place their blessed feet ; the 
pulleys and the coarse tackle through which the more 
subtle and refined forms and forces of the universe 
play the infinite game of Living. 

For in very deed and truth the material worlds so 
infinitely multitudinous and magnificent as they are 
to the eye of the astronomer, and separated as they 
are from each other by such amazing distances, are 
but the merest atoms in this infinite ocean of Life, 
when we compare them with the vast spiritual 
worlds with their more infinite dimensions, spaces, 
forms, potencies, splendors and harmonies, that in- 
vest them on every side and occupy their vast inter- 
spaces to complete the Divine fullness and perfec- 
tion of the Infinite Life. 

Our material sun, so-called, is in truth a vast 
world, eight hundred and sixty-six thousand miles 
in diameter. Beneath this vast photosphere, calori- 
sphere and other atmospheres with which he invests 
himself to the height and depth of twenty-five thou- 
sand miles on every side of him, there is a solid, 
substantial world nearly eight hundred and twenty 
thousand miles in diameter, and inhabited by billions 
of the great universal family of man, living in intel- 
lectual and spiritual estates far in advance of those 
occupying our own little world. Indeed many of 
them have been our instructors, as have many of the 
advanced teachers of some of the larger planets. 

Our sun has more than fifty times the area upon 
his solid globe of all his planets that he bears along 
with him in his sublime march through life — not 
mere empty space, and it would indeed be a vast 
waste of opportunity for the Creator to let it remain 
forever a desert waste, when He is so careful to 
establish life everywhere apparently, even among 
the snows of the Arctic world. His photospheres, 
calorispheres and magnetospheres instead of being 
so intensely heated as to destroy all surrounding life, 
do but generate a sufficient warmth to impart life 
and well being to all his inhabitants, and by an 

191 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

electrical transfer, as with our terrestrial telephones 
and telegraphs, he is enabled to excite in the various 
atmospheres of his attendant worlds those condi- 
tions or states by which their several atmospheres 
are enabled to generate the light and heat with 
which all life upon them is sustained. 

The vast spiritual-celestial heavens of our star — 
the sun — which forms the Celestial City of our God, 
hath in its greatest, or its major equatorial, diame- 
ter an extent of one hundred and fifty billions of our 
terrestrial miles, or more than a million and a half 
times the distance of the earth from the sun, while 
its transverse diameter, upon the same equatorial 
plane, is eighty billions, and its polaris diameter is 
but four and a half billions in extent, thus making 
the spiritual heavens, with which we are connected, 
present to the eye the appearance of an immense 
spheroid both ovate and prolate in form. 

But this is not all that may be said of its fair 
and wonderful proportions. Outside of this vast orb 
and environing it on every side to the height and 
depth of twenty-five billions of miles is the vast 
spiritual-celestial corona — an unutterable, divine 
halo or glory — a spiritual-celestial atmosphere, pho- 
tosphere and mento-sphere, and, comparing great 
things with small, resembles and corresponds with 
the halo with which the old painters invested the 
head of the beloved Christ. 

For all things of the individual and finite universe 
of the microcosm, have their correspondences and 
greater prototypes in the more infinite macrocosms 
and in the infinite, absolute holocosm of the infinite 
God. Since the finite man is but an infinitesimal 
copy of the infinite universes of the living God, and 
is designed to lift up his mind into a proper under- 
standing of Him, by an easy and profound and ever 
present illustration. 



192 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

God of the granite and the rose 

The molecule and the morning star, 

Thy spirit thro' all being flows 
And far is near and near is far. 

In Thine immensity of thought 

All things are born, and all things die. 
The eternities for Thee hath wrought 
Full many a system, star and sky. 

Before Thy throne of boundless might 
Man bows himself in reverent love. 

But knows, in all these worlds of light. 
He's kindred with the stars above. 

Almighty Father, Lord of all. 
Teach us to view with equal eye 

The small in great, the great in small, 
The wonders that about us lie. 

S. A. Merrill. 
Ocean Park, 1904. 

»■ ■» 

"There is a natural body and there is a spiritual 
body • . . There are bodies celestial and bodies 
terrestrial. But the glory of the celestial is one 
and the glory of the terrestrial is another." — Paul. 

*'By which also he (Christ) went and preached 
unto the spirits in prison." — I. Peter, iii., 19. 

We quote the following, one of the mistakes of 
Swedenborg, from "Heaven and Hell," No. 480: 

"That man after death remains to eternity such 
as he is as to his will or reigning love has also been 
confirmed by abundant experience. . . . 

"To change that love in a spirit therefore would 
be to deprive him of his life, or to annihilate him. 

193 



/ 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

They also told the reason, namely, that man after' 
death can no longer be reformed by instruction as 
in the world, because the ultimate plane, which con- 
sists of natural knowledge and affections, is then 
quiescent and cannot be opened, because it is not 
spiritual; and that upon that plane the interiors 
which are of the mind rest as a house on its founda- 
tion, and hence it is that man remains to eternity 
such as the life of his love had been in the world/' 
The fatalism contained in this paragraph from 
the great seer is very much in character with the 
very gross and exaggerated statements in Theoso- 
phy concerning the doctrine of the Karma. 

In both statements it is a little more than an 
assertion that the leading attributes and functions 
in the original constitution or life of man pass 
through the various transformations that he is 
obliged to without any essential or injurious change -3 
therein. And this is just what we ought both to 
desire and expect from the very nature of the law 
that governs the evolution of all beings. For man 
is constantly, indeed every moment, undergoing 
beneficent economic changes within himself. 

But the greatest of the transforming influences 
that go to help him in his efforts to effect any benefi- 
cent modifications or changes in his original make- 
up are to be foun3 in the supplementary reincarna- 
tion that he undergoes after the decrease of the 
animal body coupled with those that take place 
during his long residence in spirit life prior to the 
next incarnation in terrestrial states. But this ter- 
restriation, this being reborn into the new terrestrial 
estates and conditions, and in the holy being of 
a new, perhaps a very different, earthly mother — 
from the one that presided over the previous terres- 
triation — becomes the very greatest of these benign 
transforming influences that aid the man in his 
efforts to shape his own destiny. 

Otherwise he would indeed become the victim of 
a stern and inexorable fatalism — one that would be 
imposed upon him by the otherwise absolutely ben- 

194 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

eficent and necessary conservatism and durability 
of his own constitutional make-up — and one that 
like the uncast cauda of the young bactrachean 
steers from behind and from inferior forces and with 
retrogressive rather than progressive results. There 
is a numerous class of mankind — the vicious and 
criminal — who if they were obliged to take up their 
life lines at the point where they laid them down 
at the end of their former incarnation in earth life 
and to follow them out in the direction of their life 
tendencies at that time, as taught by the gross and 
absurd tenets of theosophy — that would find them- 
selves moving nearward toward the monad and 
ultimate extinction. 

There is no alternative. It is a monstrous fallacy 
and misconception of the sublime law that governs 
heredity, environment and re-birth, and like the 
Orthodox and the Swedenborgian conceptions of a 
literal hell, is one of those ghostly and irrational 
caricatures of reason of science and of enlightened 
common sense that have come down to us from a 
blind and ignorant past, when man was in his spir- 
itual infancy and lived in the literal sense of the 
word from his inability to perceive its true spiritual 
sense and to understand the divine law that is dimly 
shadowed forth in the literal or symbolical sense. 

It is this literal and imperfect sense of the Divine 
Word that the great mass of mankind still "live 
for and have their being." 

The Law of Cure. 

In the practical annulment and repeal of this 
fatalistic law and for the uses of spirits in the treat- 
ment of the maladies of spirit life, the world is in- 
debted much to the old Greek philosophers and sages, 
and especially to Anaxagoras, "the father of modern 
science," as he is sometimes called, who devoted 
long years to the study of man in abnormal condi- 
tions. He studied man as he manifested himself in 
all his natural modes and habits of action and of 

195 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

being, and especially among those classes who, not 
having been reared under the bias of any special 
religious creed or cult, were leading more natural 
lives in the land of the soul. 

The seer Swedenborg has in truth well defined 
the law, as we shall see, in its general forms and 
tendencies, for it is the same law correspondentially 
and on the material plane, that obliges one body to 
move on forever in the direction of the impelling 
force until given a new direction or brought to a 
state of rest by some force. 

Swedenborg's mistake lay in the fact that his pre- 
conceived (church) ideas and prejudices, which 
were those of his principal spirit instructor, St. 
Augustine, mislead him. And neither of them were 
far advanced enough into the laws of metaphysi- 
ology to comprehend the fact that one spirit can 
temporarily lend his material body to another for 
hygienic purposes, as one person can temporarily 
loan his coat or even a whole suit to another to pro- 
tect him from the inclemencies of the weather. This 
principle is well illustrated by the methods em- 
ployed by the spiritual healer in the treatment of 
the sick of this life. He first makes use of his own 
material organism to draw out the poisons from that 
of his patient, and afterward infuses a portion of 
his own purer magnetisms — spiritual blood — in 
place of it to rebuild his whole system, animal and 
spiritual, on higher, purer conditions. 

But this ancient Greek seer, noting the fact of the 
almost universal tendency of spirits to return and 
remain upon the earth plane and to mingle with the 
inhabitants of earth-life as far as possible, set him- 
self to work to study the laws involved in the rela- 
tions established between the two classes by their 
after intercourse. 

He observed the wonderful tendency of spirits, 
great numbers of them, to seek to come into rapport 
with cognate minds, especially in earth-life, and that 
many of them, even of the insane, in the course of 
time became relieved of their maladies incurred 

196 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS, 

during their earth life, while such as from ignorance 
of the laws of control or from injurious preceptions 
remained away, continued in the same condition in 
which they entered the spirit world. 

If we look a little closely into this law of mutual 
aid which spirits both in the same world and in 
both worlds may render each other — for there is 
much of mutuality in it — and which a spirit while 
yet in the flesh may render either knowingly or un- 
knowingly, we shall see that it is one of the benign 
arragements of Divine Providence whereby man 
as a social being is enabled to confer almost infinite 
benefits upon his fellow. So that there is a profound 
occult or hidden truth in the old hymn: 

"There is a fountain filled with blood, 

Drawn from Emanuel's veins, 
And sinners plunged beneath that flood 
Lose all their guilty stains/' 

But that "blood'^ — what is it but love — ^the creator 
and the regenerator of the worlds? What is it but 
those divine personal electro-magnetisms that per- 
vade every part, organ and function of the divine 
man and the divine woman, and not only thrill with 
life and with joy every atom of their being, mental, 
moral, material, but when rightly used are marvel- 
ously hygienic and medicinal, not only to their pos- 
sessor, but to all to whom he may impart them? 
Hence the marvels of healing by spiritual healers 
and by mental and Christian Scientists. They give 
them of this divine healing energy and they are 
made anew. But the sphere of the true spiritual 
healer is not confined to this world alone, but ex- 
tends equally to the spirit world and to all its in- 
habitants. 

And who is "Emanuel,'' or "God with us,'' but 
man himself? 

And what is that "fountain filled with blood" but 
the vast divine, holy infinite universe of the living 
God? 

197 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

In this way Anaxagoras became cognizant of the 
great law of cure — the law of liberty, of escape from 
the otherwise fatal limitations inherent in his own 
constitution — a stubborn and absolutely necessary 
and useful resistance to changes injurious to the 
perpetuity of his existence — and which can only be 
made subservient to those radical changes that are 
necessary under certain conditions to be wrought 
in the spiritual nature of man in order that he may 
get rid of his sins and at the same time may escape 
the fatalism of this law of his being as defined by 
Swedenborg — by a proper use of all those divine 
social, spiritual and celestial influences and forces 
that in the other life, as well as in the present, exert 
their benign influence in the changes and transfor- 
mations he is obliged to pass through in both worlds. 
But Swedenborg was not cognizant of this law of 
mind by which man is enabled to escape from the 
fatalistic tendencies of his own system, and for the 
simple reason that great as he was, both his own 
preconceived views and his childlike reliance on the 
absolute truth of the communications of his spirit 
teachers prevented him. 

The same is also true of a great portion of the 
church fathers even to this day, and hence so many 
of them still adhere nominally at least to the eter- 
nality of a literal hell. 

The principles involved in this law of supple- 
mentary reincarnation and re-birth — for that is what 
it is — this law of escape by the spirit form the 
tyranny of his own body — were first introduced, but 
to a very limited extent, into spirit life by the old 
Greeks, centuries in advance of its more extensive 
use in recent years. But church influences and pre- 
judices were too strong for its general adoption. The 
church fathers in both worlds, living in the literal 
sense of the word, could not regard the matter in 
any other light, since for man in his infantile and 
unscientific spiritual estates, as he then was, it was 
unavoidable, and best indeed that he should be. 

Our Father in Heaven imparts his laws to his in- 

iq8 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

fant spiritual children on the earth as commands, 
in the same manner and for a like reason that an 
earthly parent issues his authoritative command to 
his child : "Keep out of the fire V while he is yet in 
his infancy and of too little understanding and ex- 
perience to comprehend the real nature of the 
danger. 

There are great and infinite dangers to be met, 
resisted and overcome by man with all the "might, 
mind and strength'' of which he is capable, assisted 
by the angels and even God himself. 

And hence the frequent and fervent admonitions 
of the Christ: "Strive to enter in at the straight 
gate; for many, I say unto you, shall seek to enter 
in, but shall not be able/' And this caution was 
far more necessary to place before man in an im- 
perative form at that time when he was in a more 
childish and barbarous condition, than for those 
living to-day, who better understand the laws of 
being. 

"There be more things in heaven and earth than 
dreamed of in our philosophies." — Horatio. 

If now we follow the decarnated man into his 
higher post-terrestrial life, we find that in accord- 
ance with the important law of metampsychosis he 
puts oflf his spiritual body — as is well known to 
spiritualists — and appears in another, which is even 
more beautiful and refined in its character than is 
the spiritual one. This is the celestial body of man, 
and it is quite as "invisible" to the spiritual man as 
the latter is to the terrestrial man. It sustains a 
similar relation also to the spiritual body that this 
one does to the terrestrial. 

The time of the putting off, or death, of the spir- 
itual body takes place about the time of his attain- 
ing the fifteenth sphere, and forms one of the danger 
points for such as have lived a too gross and impure 
life while in the flesh. For if his earth life has been 
too much on the animal plane, the spiritual body 
and the celestial body also become so weighed down 
and perverted in their character by the material, 

199 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

moral and spiritual poisons the man has incorpo- 
rated within his whole system that after he has cast 
off the two outer vestments or bodies he finds him- 
self in too weak and demoralized a state to well com- 
plete the long cycle upon which he has*" entered or 
to easily pass through the '^narrow gate" that marks 
the transition from the celestial to the terrestrial life 
at the next incarnation. Such weaklings find much 
difficulty in making this transition. But such trials 
in the life of man spiritual belong now chiefly to 
the past and to those who still cling too tenaciously 
to the ideas and methods of the past. Science is 
accomplishing wonders in freeing man from the 
shackles of ignorance, bigotry and sin in spirit life, 
even the very worst, and preparing him in no very 
great time to begin his triumphal march toward the 
eternal city ! It has removed the barriers which 
ignorance and superstition have so long interposed 
against free progress and abolished the "thousand 
year" cycle during which the lower classes of spirits 
have been obliged to remain on the earth plane to 
get rid of the detaining forces that hold *'earth bound 
spirits" for the lack of that knowledge, sympathy 
and help which he can now obtain from the great 
souls who are prosecuting this war against igno- 
rance, darkness and crime, those who in the past, 
from the gross conditions of their spiritual bodies, 
have been obliged to remain on the lower planes, 
where they can have free access to the earth forces 
and that was really the best for them in every way 
at that time — at the end of this long so-called "thou- 
sand year" term, which is not an arbitrary period of 
time, become enabled at last to progress out of the 
lower spheres and to be able to cast of? the spirit 
body in one of the higher spheres. 

This is what is implied in Revelations xx., 5, 6, 
as the "Second Resurrection." His contemporaries 
in the flesh life, however, who entered spirit life 
about the time he did but under more normal con- 
ditions and started upon the long journey soon after 
their entrance, have passed the danger point by the 

200 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

'Tirst Resurrection." For, as stated by the intelli- 
gent angel who was showing John "these things" 
"over such the Second Death" — the putting off of 
the spiritual body — "hath no power." John, not well 
understanding these instructions of the angels, has 
stated the subject in a somewhat inverted form. 

Uncounted millions of the low orders of spirits 
an many that are not so low, prefer to remain upon 
the terrestrial planes of existence and pass through 
all the necessary transformations there and rem.ain 
there still for long ages, and are very useful to the 
higher creative Gods in the labors of world building 
and other important oflfices. They are the classes 
that theosophists call "elements" and "elementaries" 
and are indispensable, as stated in much of the la- 
bors performed by the higher spirits in the building, 
unbuilding and rebuilding of world. They have also 
great power over the elements. Hence the name 
elementals. It was such spirits that carried out the 
commands of the Master when he "rebuked the 
winds and the sea, and there was a great calm." 
There are plenty of authentic examples that have 
come down to us both by history and tradition in 
which human lives and weak and struggling human 
causes have been saved by this very useful and 
worthy people. In past times they have often ap- 
peared to sensitive people, so that tradition is not 
wrong in telling us of gnomes, elves, fairies and such 
folks. For a time there is no place in earth, heaven 
or even space itself where man, the ubiquitous being, 
may not normally reside. 

We have conversed with some of these spirits, 
who have great wisdom and power. It is not in- 
tended by the guides of our civilization that man- 
kind in general shall have intercourse with these 
classes of spirits, and especially the people of our 
own race, lest they, like the Hindus, many of them, 
also fall into the practice of the arts of "black 
magic." And that is the reason also why spirit in- 
tercourse has been practically suppressed by the 
church for long ages and not permitted again until 

201 



MAN'S PLACE IN THE KOSMOS. 

1837, when it was at last introduced among the 
Shakers, and continued with them for seven years, 
when the presiding spirit intelligences left them, but 
before doing so informed them that it was for the 
purpose of ''opening up communication with skep- 
tics and doubting Christians." It was this class 
that was intended to be reached in this way by the 
guides of civilization, by permitting the "doubting 
Thomases'' in human life, who cannot believe in a 
spirit man or a spirit world on the second hand evi- 
dence of other people, but must have some present 
this year facts of their own before they can be sat- 
isfied. 

Still, the spiritual heavens are practically closed 
to a large class of mankind, especially in the 
churches, and will likely so remain until after the 
gerat revolution that shall establish socialism and 
the divine eternal equality and brotherhood of man, 
at which time the more spiritual order of civilization, 
the millenium, will be inaugurated and established. 
And it is very near at hand. The entire heavens 
dawn with the light of the new era. 



The End. 



202 



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